FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000

Recently honoured in Spain in recognition of his long and distinguished career in film, Arturo Ripstein (who started out back in 1962 as Luis Buñuel's directorial assistant on The Exterminating Angel) becomes more prolific with each passing year. The award is solid testament to the continually rising star's reputation as Mexico's standout film-maker on the international circuit. Recent years have seen three key projects consolidate him: 1996's Profundo Carmesi, 1998's El Evangelio De La Maravillas, and most successfully, 1999's adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba."

Shot in just three weeks in October and November of last year, Asi Es La Vida (Such Is Life) is Ripstein's 23rd feature. The film's storyline, typically for the director, is intense and short on the easy laugh. It's a latter-day version, in the film-maker's words, of the "cruel and terrible" classical tragedy of Medea, making it another
literary adaptation from a director who has, apart from Marquez, already been inspired by writers Guy De Maupassant and fellow Mexican Carlos Fuentes.

Twenty-five-year-old Julia (Arcelia Ramirez) lives in a large, impersonal city with her husband, two children and all the trappings of a bored urban existence. She ekes out a living from nursing and carries out the occasional abortion. When her husband leaves her for another woman, Julia's world and everything she has worked for falls apart, and she is left homeless. But her desolation gives way to a desire for revenge and her children will be the agents of that revenge.

Jonathan Holland