CREPÚSCULO

Doctor Alejandro Mangina is so sick he doesn't want to get well. Specifically, he has encountered old flame Lucia, posing for an art class, shortly before leaving the country and the chance encounter has inflamed his passion for her. These feelings are so intense they awaken a tumescent darkness inside him, a passion not diminished by either his time away or Lucia's marriage to his friend Ricardo.

If Noir City has screened a movie hornier than CREPÚSCULO, I regret having missed it. The movie singlehandedly puts to pasture any notion that black-and-white movies were/are haughty and sexless. In terms of noir history it takes the erotic heat of John Dall's first look at Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY or the drum solo from PHANTOM LADY and sustains that energy for 108 bewildering, exhilarating minutes.

But the machine that energy fuels is a delightful and fiery cinematic contraption. Writer/director Julio Bracho's theatrical bona fides are on glorious display, from the shadows that fall over the characters during moments of intensity to the gorgeous poetry of the language: the subtexts come pirouetting gorgeously out of the mouths of the characters, but the beauty of the language keeps us grounded in their emotions. The sensuality of the lead performances keeps us fully engrossed even as the more heady literary fanices unfold: Mangina has just authored a book outlining the psychological disintegration of a single subject, and we get the impression that his book (also called Crepúsculo) is adapting itself before our very eyes. And when the single first-person narration is suddenly taken over by all three participants in a crucial scene it feels like we're leaving the planet.

During her sterling introduction alongside Noir City impresario Eddie Muller, Morelia Film Festival director Daniela Michel noted that Crepúsculo was the favorite Mexican film of the late "man of cinema" Pierre Rissient (which is enough to make me happily, humbly, reassess some of my unfairly stodgy impressions of the man.) Academic questions such as "what qualifies this as film noir?" are promptly forgotten as we feel like we're being absorbed into the warm, lush darkness of an overriding supercinematic consciousness. The invitation from a filmmaker like Bracho to dance is like the moment an irresistible femme fatale winks at us, a seductive shadow that promises rapture even as it shuts out the light. Leaving the cinema after such an engaging and luscious tryst we pull the shadows around us, willing the joy to linger, closing our eyes to trap the darkness, to let twilight linger just a little while longer. That is noir, ice cold and hot as hell.