Production Notes
Orson Welles went south of the border to Mexico to film his fantasy of greed and corruption, "A Touch of Evil". Portillo says about The Devil Never Sleeps: "I want to journey back and forth across this same border with a different mission. My work as a filmmaker has been divided between fiction and documentary, between investigative and lyrical non-fiction on the one hand, and realist and stylized dramas on the other. I want to combine these strands into a personal investigation of the past. I use the camera as a witness, but one who is intimate with the experiences of the observed because they are also my own."
Lourdes Portillo's parents moved from Chihuahua, Mexico to Los Angeles, USA with their children when she was thirteen years old. In the years that followed the family remained connected with the relatives they had left behind, but too removed to follow the internecine drama that was slowly unfolding back in "the provinces."
At the center of this drama was Tio (uncle) Oscar, the star son of a middle class family. The mysteries of his life and character, which the film explores but cannot entirely resolve, emerge against the backdrop of the shady history of agriculture in northern Mexico. Oscar Ruiz Almeida was trained as an agronomist and among the first to suggest that the dry earth of Sonora and Chihuahua could be made to bear fruit with proper irrigation. It was the 1940s, and the Mexican government was involved in a host of infrastructural projects aimed at increasing the countries exports of fruit and vegetables. With water from dammed rivers and deep wells, formerly desert ranches began to prosper growing tomatoes for North American tables. Tio Oscar became rich this way, raising his family's social position and launching his own political career, eventually becoming mayor of the coastal city Guaymas.
But the land suffered. Over time, the wells drained the water table and upset the balance of salt water and agua dulce. Sea water began to flow inland through subterraneaous channels, saturating the earth with salt, making it impossible to grow anything. Other contaminants were simultaneously entering the environment of northern Mexico from the air. Portillo alludes visually to the presence of pesticides with archival footage of a dusting plane flying over a field and an eerie shot of a ripe, red tomato being covered in white powder. We learn early in the film that Oscar's first wife died of cancer. The film draws no firm conclusions, but implicitly connects the death of this "strong woman" with a "great love of the land" to the pollution of the land itself.
The Devil Never Sleeps is grounded in both the personal and political culture of northern Mexico. According to Portillo, the rest of Mexico has always looked on Chihuahua as a sort of hinterland and its inhabitants as "barbarians from the north." Gun slinging is still among the most popular sports there; a woman friend of Oscar's confesses that she "loves guns." Chihuahua has hosted some of Mexico's wildest episodes, and frequently harbored outcasts and dissidents. Sixteenth century Jews fleeing the Inquisition took refuge in the north of Chihuahua. Pancho Villa, the best loved rebel of Mexico's history, adopted Chihuahua as his home. During the Mexican Revolution he used the desert region as the base for the only foreign invasion the United States has ever known.
Portillo's film evokes the heroic past that is always present in the minds of Chihuahuans, but must also contend with the violence and betrayal that characterized the lives of the heroes themselves. At one point the voiceover tells us that "the revolutionary is the heart and soul of Mexico." The next moment we hear shots, and a photo of Pancho Villa gunned down by his former compañeros appears on the screen. "Money can fix anything here" the filmmaker's father states. Statements like this might appear to support Welles's bewitching vision of Mexico as the capital of duplicity, however a closer look at The Devil Never Sleeps tells otherwise.
The mystery style in which the filrn is shot is designed to give one the feeling that there is something rotten in Chihuahua. We hear of unpaid debts, perfunctory police investigations, ancient scandals and are inclined to view almost everyone Portillo interviews with suspicion. But as we listen to Tio Oscar's friends and relatives talk about him, it begins to seem less that some of them are liars than that all are believers in separate truths. Each person loyal to the memory they have of Oscar. Indeed, the fact that suicide did not fit Portillo's memory of her "beloved uncle" drove her back to Chihuahua to sort "the truth" from the tangle of accusations his family had spun around his corpse. What she discovers there is that truth (in the Anglo sense of 'fact') does not mean the same thing in a land where passions run as deep as salt-water wells.
