Synopsis
With The Devil Never Sleeps/EI Diablo Nunca Duerme, Lourdes Portillo continues her ground-breaking work, this time mining the complicated intersections of analysis and autobiography, evidence and hypothesis, even melodrama and police procedure. Her unorthodox means of exploring the subject here include the use of clips from television soap operas, 8mm home movies, archival footage, family photographs, and stylized visual reminiscences.
Early one Sunday morning in July, the filmmaker receives a phone call informing her that her beloved Tio (uncle) Oscar Ruiz Almeida has been found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in Chihuahua, Mexico. His widow has declared his death a suicide. Most of his family, however, cry murder and point to a number of possible suspects: his business partner, his ranch-hand, the widow herself.
In The Devil Never Sleeps, Portillo returns to the land of her birth to find out exactly who her uncle was and to investigate the circumstances of his death. She explores "irrational" as well as "logical" explanations, searching for clues on both sides of the border and in the history of her family. Old tales of betrayal, passion, lust and supernatural visitation emerge as we follow the filmmaker deep into the life of a community in the homeland of PanchoVilla.
The Devil Never Sleeps exposes the loves and hatreds of a Mexican family convulsed by the death of one of its members. The emotions which Portillo captures in her particular blend of traditional and experimental techniques bring out the nuances of Mexican social and family order. Poetic, tragic, humorous and mythic, this film crosses the borders of personal values, cultural mores and the discipline of filmmaking itself.
Tio Oscar's death revives in Portillo the resonances of her early upbringing and ancestry; the film works both as an exciting "documystery" and as a lyrical account of a personal journey. It uncovers Portillo's feelings for Mexico as she invites the viewer to accompany her to a place beyond fact or fiction, where truth is stranger than any telenovela (Mexican soap opera) and where, as they say in Northern Mexico when evil is lurking, the devil never sleeps!
