El Santo Oficio (1974) Arturo Ripstein

Last week I went to watch El Santo Oficio (The Holy Office) in 35mm.  Circo 2.12 is doing a small retrospective on Ripstein's work all Wednesdays at Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco,  so I thought it was a good opportunity to re-watch some of his films and get to know the ones I hadn't seen.  The truth is, I'm a big fan of Ripstein, and all of his movies I've watched (which are not that many), are either good or excellent... all but this one.



I really don't know how the critics and the audience responded to this film when it was first released.  Somebody told me it won a couple of Arieles.  I think it should have been a let down, though.  But even it wasn't, it is clear to me that it didn't transcend time, since now-a-days most of the young people, haven't heard about the movie at all.

The first fifteen minutes are very interesting.  The son betraying his whole family in exchange for a place in heaven is beautifully sordid.  But then Ripstein decides to focus on making a larger scale criticism on the Catholic church.  He distances the audience from the characters in order to let us see the bigger picture.  But the truth is watching a fiction which central theme is Catholics vs Jews is awfully boring,  Ripstein forgot the human aspect, the contradictions, the sordidness, that often characterize his work.  In my opinion, he should've focused on the brother that sold his family to the inquisition, not on the brother that thinks  Judaism is the one and only true religion. 

Anyway, more than just that, I think the movie isn't good because you never empathize with the character, it's too slow and the rhythm is completely off most of the time, the acting isn't that good, and there aren't any cool camera movements.