Leave it to Arturo Ripstein, enfant terrible of Mexican cinema for fifty years and counting, to make one of its most tawdry tales even more depraved. Split into four chapters, each chronicling the film’s doomed romance from a different perspective, Ripstein’s THE WOMAN OF THE PORT extends his source material’s central wickedness to its extreme, as though taunting viewers with an embodied vision of the Mexico they fear from morbid and shocking news reports worldwide. An incendiary film, as only Ripstein can make them, this most recent adaptation of Mexican cinema’s most intriguing and unpleasant myth foreshadows the squalor Ripstein would continue to burrow himself as a filmmaker while making an opus of what was once a simple expat’s attempt at adapting de Maupassant.