Looking for Love Where the Air is Clear: Deconstructing Masculinity in Arturo Ripstein's and Paz Alicia Garciadiego's Mentiras Piadosas (1988‪)‬

In the twenty-year span that director Arturo Ripstein and scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego have been collaborating--as filmmakers and as a real life couple--they have made over ten films together and ate now well-recognized and well-established as important figures in Mexican and Latin American cinema. Their work reflects a curious trend in the aesthetically and politically avant-garde Nuevo Cine projects of the 1960s: the return to traditional genres of narrative cinema, in this case melodrama, but from a critical and innovative perspective. As Ripstein explains to Hector Rivera, "Mis melodramas tienen la diferencia fundamental con los melodramas habituales del cine mexicano de que no ensalzan una serie de valores, sino que mas bien descreen esos valores y se van contra ellos a patadas, y mis peliculas terminan siendo como una especie de guantes que uno se quita y es el otro lado de la moneda" (35). Their films belong to a category of films that Susan Dever designates as "neomelodramas," in that they "alternately pay homage to and critique the traditional practices of the genre" (125). To the extent that (neo)melodramas often revolve around the politics and performance of gender, the critical categories of gender (the sociocultural construct of sexual difference: masculinity and femininity as construct/representation/performance) and sexuality (the psychobiological expression of pleasure and desire centered in the bodily experience of male and female), as these intersect with issues of melodrama and nation, are extremely useful for understanding Ripstein and Garciadiego's films. From the perspective of the patriarchal (heterosexual and bourgeois) ideology that informs the emergence of melodrama as a gente and explains its continued persistence as a narrative mode, it would seem that issues of gender and sexuality are always implicit in these two basic realms of human experience, that is, couples and families: a man and a woman get together, get married, have sex, have children, and so the patriarchal social order is reproduced--in both a material and an ideological sense. This process is clarified by Silvia Oroz in her extensive study of classic Latin American film melodrama in which she maintains that the gente focuses on two kinds of love: male-female (what she calls, "o amor homem-mulher:" sexual/romantic love with marriage as its goal) and filial/fraternal love (what she deems, "o amor/sacrificio"), which in both instances, share the goal of productivity, that is, the reproduction of the patriarchal social order. Carlos Monsivais corroborates these ideas in his discussion of Mexican Golden Age melodrama, when he observes how "The melodrama seemed to be an excellent vehicle for securing the hegemony of traditional values.... Before the essential message of all cinema was understood (that is to say, the irrefutable power of modern life), the film industry exalted the repression of instincts in favour of moral servitude ..." (119).