Perdita Durango is not so much a sequel or a prequel, as it is a spinoff of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). In Wild at Heart Perdita Durango was a minor character who appeared toward the end of the film, played by Lynch’s wife Isabella Rossellini. The character then became the subject of a novel by Wild at Heart’s original novelist Barry Gifford. This novel was then made into a film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, a former Almodovar protégé, who has made a string of genre films including Accion Mutante (1993) and The Day of the Beast (1995).
Wild at Heart was a psychotically fractured road movie where Lynch kept pushing into disturbed mental spaces in ways that were genuinely startling. Perdita Durango is similarly construed as a road movie featuring two outlaw lovers on the run from various killers (including the character of Marcelo Santos from Wild at Heart). But Perdita Durango is in many ways a far more dangerous film than Wild at Heart was. In Wild at Heart Sailor and Lulu were essentially good kids who’d traveled onto the wrong side of the tracks trying to find love in a deranged world stacked against them. Here Perdita Durango and Romeo Delarosa are two similar lovers but they are steeped in evil - one’s a bank robber, both are cold-blooded murderers. Romeo at one conducts a human sacrifice and eats the victim’s heart in a Santeria ceremony. Both also kidnap and forcibly rape a young white teenage couple with the intention of using them as human sacrifices - and Romeo later tries to sell the girl into prostitution to a pimp to pay off a debt.
It is a splendidly irresponsible film. There’s a real blast of anarchic spleandour and malice to de la Iglesia’s direction. The film is like a sarcastic stab up against all that is wholesomely middle-class - Harley Cross and Aimee Graham (Heather’s sister) gives hilarious performances as the whitebread kids with some hysterical scenes like where Cross tries to offer white guilt apologies for the mistreatment of Mexicans or where the two of them start nominating the other to be chosen for sacrifice. There’s the sense of danger and outrage that can explode at any moment - like the scene which comes just out of nowhere where on impulse the couple kidnap the teenagers at gunpoint in a crowded El Paso street. It’s a film that embraces quite the darkest, most sardonic worldview one has seen in some time - it sees that the whole world, law enforcement and criminals alike, as corrupt, inept or self-interested and that the only honesty is a primal strength and ferocity of doing whatever you like and at least being honest to one’s self.
The point that should be made is that despite what in any other film would have them painted in the blackest terms possible, Perdita and Romeo are quite an appealing couple. Perdita is played by Rosie Perez, a Latin American actress, best remembered for playing hot-tempered Latino hellcats in films like Do the Right Thing (1989) and White Men Can’t Jump (1992). But here, despite affecting a cynical sneer, she seems rather subdued. It could well be that she is dominated by the sheer alpha male magnetism of Spanish actor Javier (Jamon Jamon, Before Night Falls) Bardem’s performance which indeed carries the whole film with its effortless likeability. Indeed Bardem dominates the film so much it should really have been called Romeo Delarosa rather than Perdita Durango. -- Richard Scheib, The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review / www.moria.co.nz
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