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The great Mexican writer-director Arturo Ripstein, whose unjustly overlooked melodrama Woman of the Port was a highlight of MoMA’s 2019 To Save and Project festival, returns in top subversive form with El diablo entre las piernas (Devil between the Legs), his most recent collaboration with his scenarist wife Paz Alicia Garciadiego and the actors Sylvia Pasquel and Alejandro Suarez. Todd McCarthy writes in Variety that “Ripstein has…pulled off something rather extraordinary: a startling, confident, complex and entirely bold dive into the compulsions behind senescent eroticism that’s nearly as explicit as Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and perhaps more psychologically penetrating.” Only rarely has cinema dared to depict the erotic acts of the elderly—Barbara Hammer’s Nitrate Kisses, Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, and Kon Ichikawa’s Odd Obsession (an adaptation of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s The Key) are among the few—and Ripstein’s is an unflinching and unapologetic evocation of the sordid, the perverse, the sad, and the cruel in sex and marriage.
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Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film.
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Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.
