Justino the Ripper

Justino opens with the unsentimental butchering of a bull that has just met its end in the ring. As hammers, axes, and long knives do their dirty work in portentous grainy black-and-white footage, co-writers/co-directors Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar (they call themselves “La Cuadrilla” — “The Team”) let viewers know right off the bat that theirs is not a movie for the squeamish.

For thirty years Justino, a sixty-two-year-old puntillero (the bullfighting equivalent of the executioner — the man who delivers the coup de grƒce to the wounded beast), has earned his living by administering surgically precise death blows to bleeding toros. But the proud man’s glory days have come to an abrupt end. As the arrogant bullring owner unceremoniously informs Justino, “The matadors prefer one of their own team” (i.e., someone their own age). The owner bullies the puntillero into accepting early retirement. “The hospital, jail, church, or the cemetery — those are the four options for a retired man,” empathizes Justino’s fellow corrida worker and long-time crony Sansoncito (Carlos Lucas).

His distinguished career suddenly behind him, Justino (Saturnino Garcia) refuses to go gracefully into that good night, despite the best efforts of his whiny, patronizing, self-absorbed yuppie son and daughter-in-law (with whom Justino lives), the do-good social worker who keeps an eye on the old man after he wakes up from a drunken stupor in a public hospital, and the cops who don’t take him seriously. It seems as if the only person who doesn’t write off Justino because of his years is his drinking buddy Sansoncito.

Rather than passively accept his fate like a nice old man, Justino finds a new use for the skill he learned in the bullring. In much the same fashion as Maxwell utilized his silver hammer, Justino wields the bronze puntillero’s dagger proffered as a parting gift by the bullring owner. The son who criticizes his father’s ability to chop onions and suggests the old man take up handicrafts or cooking to pass the time soon learns the hard way that Justino’s aim is still true. Ignore or condescend to this old man at your peril, and don’t offer him a clean shot at that spot where the nape of your neck meets your shoulder blades.

Filmmakers Guridi and Aguilar use anarchic black humor — one hysterical corpse-disposal scene in particular calls to mind the best Pink Panther gags, complete with swingin’ Sixties soundtrack music — to lodge a powerful protest against the marginalization of the elderly. Justino blends elements of Hitchcock and Arsenic and Old Lace into a satiric whole despite the limitations of an obviously minuscule budget.

Saturnino Garcia’s Justino seems appropriately feisty and indignant, and the actor has a nice touch with physical comedy. Garcia is one of those actors whose best moments lie in the spaces between his lines, when facial expressions and body language tell their own story. But as good as Garcia is, Carlos Lucas goes him one better, quietly delivering perhaps the finest acting turn of the entire film fest. Justino lags in some places and too abruptly shifts gears in others, from melodrama to serious character study to outrageous black comedy. But bolstered by Guridi and Aguilar’s warped humor and Lucas’s sublime performance, the movie offers welcome respite from the flood of contemporary cinema pandering to the sensibilities of teens with attention-deficit disorder.

Justino makes its point: Age and treachery beat youth and enthusiasm every time.

Justino.
Written and directed by Luis Guridi and Santiago Aguilar; with Saturnino Garcia and Carlos Lucas.