Spanish ex-pats & revolutionaries pontificate at length about the best tactics to dismantle fascist institutions, but our central character does not have much of a political mind to speak of himself. Questions of funding & structure aside, The Virgin of Lust is a sordid melodrama about a 1940s café waiter in Veracruz who falls into unrequited love with an opium-addicted sex worker amidst revolutionary plots to assassinate Franco. I’m not going to say the effect of this structure is transcendent or sublime in any way, but it’s at least memorably bizarre – which is also how the film feels at large.
#LUST IN LIMBO FULL MOVIE MOVIE#
It feels more like a TV ad for a movie than the actual thing, but the film eventually acknowledges that effect with a closing title card that reads “Coming soon.” So, overall The Virgin of Lust plays like a three-minute movie trailer that’s interrupted by a 2-hour stage play as its mid-ad intermission.
#LUST IN LIMBO FULL MOVIE SERIES#
The opening & closing minutes of The Virgin of Lust summarize the life & times of its protagonist in a series of quick-cut tableaus & block-letter intertitles that spell out their intent like a children’s book: “Life flows like a river,” “Every day’s the same,” etc. At the very least, it’s openly acknowledged by the text. The bizarre thing is I suspect that Flagrantly Cheap quality was somewhat intentional. There’s nothing especially cinematic about its execution, to the point where it reads more like a televised stage play than a legitimate Movie – complete with that soap opera frame rate effect that makes all BBC shows look like trash, even the expensive ones. This film is unequivocally, unashamedly Cheap. I mean that in regards to its actual price, its production values, its approach to sexuality, and its flavor of political commentary. Immediately after hitting play, it became apparent why I waited so long to give this film a chance. In that way, watching The Virgin of Lust was more than just some lazy, prurient afternoon viewing to help pass the time during this period of coronavirus-incited isolation. It’s been a full decade since there was a Blockbuster Video operating in New Orleans, though, so it’s genuinely shameful that it took me this long to work my way through the last of my purchases from that chain’s cheap-o cast-offs. At one time, Blockbuster’s 4-for-$20 liquidation sales of used DVDs comprised the majority of my new movie intake, especially in the days when I was too broke & too busy to make it out to the theater more than a couple times a year (between working full-time in restaurants and attempting to graduate college). The cloudy, bumpy texture of its plastic casing is the biggest indicator of that shame: it was a Blockbuster Video purchase. A few of my physical media purchases have rotted in that Shame Pile limbo for years, but none are quite as ancient nor as shameful as the 2002 Mexican melodrama The Virgin of Lust. This disruption of movie distribution has afforded me a lot of time to tackle what I call my “Shame Pile”: a bin of assorted DVDs & Blu-rays I haven’t watched since I purchased them.
As a response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, almost all cinemas have entirely shut down in order to adhere to proper “social distancing” practices, prompting movie studios to either unceremoniously dump this season’s new releases to VOD streaming platforms or to delay them for the indefinite future. As you’ve likely noticed, there aren’t a whole lot of new releases out there right now.
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