★★★★★ Among the films by Arturo Ripstein, one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, “The Place Without Limits” occupies a very high position, on a par with “Principio y Fin” or “Deep Crimson”. Here Ripstein portrays the life of a village brothel, a transvestite, a lost woman, a bewildered young man and a society that literally sends everything that does not fit into its patriarchal order to the margins. But no thesis film; Ripstein is one of the key men in melodrama, someone who knows how to portray the tension between the most irrational human passions and the most coercive laws (yes, Minelli, Sirk, Del Carril and Fassbinder also know about this subject). Ripstein also takes things to such a bloody (and bloody) extreme that the satirical, ironic side of a reality that establishes an abyss between facts and words emerges in the midst of the tragedy.
