Crepúsculo

A respected brain surgeon (Arturo de Córdova) comes to doubt his own sanity when the woman he’s in lust with (Gloria Marin) marries his best friend — and he starts fantasizing about murder. This is an eccentrically elegant psychological melodrama with an overheated screenplay by director Julio Bracho that unfolds in multiple flashbacks, competing voiceovers, and which stirs Freud and politics into an already spicy stew. But these apparent flaws makes Crepúsculo fascinating. As in The Kneeling Goddess, made two years later, de Córdova falls in love with a nude model and can’t shake his infatuation.

“You destroyed my life,” he tells his lover. “I destroyed myself as well,” she replies.

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This moody noirish melodrama has a surplus of artistic aspiration: The lighting is expressionist, the decor modernist, and a prominent consulting credit is given to the celebrity criminal psychologist Dr. José Quevedo.

J Hoberman, Artforum