A taste for melodrama

Arturo Ripstein, director of No One Writes to the Colonel, talks to Nick Roddick about melodratic scripts, one-party states and his collaborations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The doctor and the colonel are discussing the newspapers, which arrive once a week by launch. Because of the firm government hand on the press, there's hardly ever any Mexican news in them. It's 1956, and there's more about Suez than Vera Cruz. "The best way," says the colonel, "would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what was happening in his own country."

"To the Europeans," says the doctor, "South America is a man with a moustache, a cigar and a gun." Arturo Ripstein doesn't have a gun, but he does have a moustache (it's part of his beard) and he certainly has a cigar. Always. "Arturo!" says the lady from Canada, as he lights up a fresh one in the enclosed space of the GMC Blazer in which we're driving round Guadalajara with the air conditioning on and the windows shut. "You're not going to smoke that in here, are you?"

"Yes," says Arturo. "I smoke everywhere. Always."

Not big Mexican cigars, mind you: imported Dutch Panteras. "You can't buy small cigars in Mexico," he says. Ripstein, meanwhile, has arrived at a very similar view to that of the Colonel as far as freedom of expression is concerned. That, he says, is why melodrama is the mode in which he and his screenwriter wife, Paz-Alicia Garciadiego, prefer to operate.

"It is one of the fundamental nutrients of our narrative," he says in his fluent, American-accented English. "In Mexico, melodrama is employed frequently because there is no public voice. The public voice has been taken away from us because we have had the same party in power for over 60 years. The first thing that does is take away the 'agora', the idea of speaking out in public, which we are not used to and we don't understand any more."

El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba (No One Writes To The Colonel) is, perhaps, the least melodramatic movie Ripstein has made in quite a while: the small, poignant story of a an old soldier from the Revolutionary War who has spent years waiting for his pension. Every week, he looks for the letter confirming it, but, in his heart, he knows that what the postmaster says is true: "No one writes to the colonel".

The film is, of course, adapted from the book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which Ripstein describes as "a small novel or a very long story. In French it's called a nouvelle, but in English there is no word for it: it's a long short story or a short long novel."

But that didn't make it any easier to film. "I'm telling you, this is the most difficult film I've ever done since my first two: they were tremendously difficult because I didn't know the craft. Now, I know the craft well: I have been practising it for many, many years. But this is one of the films in which technique was an obstacle between me and the story.

"What is very complicated in this film are the very long takes: this is a dialogue movie and dialogue films are fundamentally made out of reactions. You go and you see, and you do not cut. So I needed the use of objects that reflected the characters, and of course, my love of mirrors finally did the trick."

The Colonel is Ripstein's third collaboration with Marquez, although it's been 30 years since collaborations one and two. "I met Garcia Marquez through a mutual friend, years before he was Garcia Marquez," says the director. "I was trying desperately to get into films. I was very young, about 19 or 20, and I knew Garcia Marquez was living in Mexico, working in an ad company. So I asked this friend, an actor, to introduce me to him. He was a very gentle person, struggling desperately to make a living. And I mean desperately."

Ripstein's father, an established producer, was dead set against his son going into films. But, after a few false starts studying law, history and the history of art, he agreed to let the lad have a go at scriptwriting. Ripstein Jr wrote his first screenplay and took it round to his new friend.

"I told him, 'Read it and tell me what you think'," he recalls. "I lived very far away from Garcia Marquez, but even then I could hear his laughter at my horrendous script. So he said 'Listen, I have this one. See what you think'. At that time, the only Mexican films that sold, basically in Germany, were westerns, so we adapted it into a western - or what we thought looked like a western - and that's how we started."

The outcome was Tiempo De Morir in 1965, followed by Juego Peligroso in 1966. "We became very close friends," says Ripstein. "He was not only gracious and gentle but he was tremendously helpful. I was a kid, I was a 20-year-old kid when this was happening" (in fact, Ripstein was 22).

Subsequently, their paths drifted apart. In the meantime, One Hundred Years Of Solitude was published, and Garcia Marquez became Garcia Marquez. But the idea of adapting The Colonel remained close to Ripstein's heart. Marquez was less sure. And besides, the rights were only periodically available.

"Whenever I saw him, he was cordial at times, not very cordial at other times, and we had sort of a slip-up at a given point, when we were not too good friends," admits Ripstein. "Then, many years later in Cartagena [the international film festival in Marquez's native Colombia], he said, 'OK, now you've learned, go ahead and do The Colonel. His conditions were: do it in black and white and do not use a certain actor. So I didn't have the actor that he didn't want to portray the colonel but we couldn't do it in black and white for reasons that we all know."