Death and the Compass is British director Alex Cox's second Mexican feature (the first was El Patrullero), made in 1996. Based on the short story Death and the Compass (La Muerte y La Brújula) by Jorge Luis Borges, the film is in English, and stars Peter Boyle as Erik Lönnrot the detective, Miguel Sandoval as Treviranus, his boss, and Christopher Eccleston as Red Scharlach/Zunz. Mexican actress Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez appears as Ms Espinosa/Harleq...
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Death and the Compass is British director Alex Cox's second Mexican feature (the first was El Patrullero), made in 1996. Based on the short story Death and the Compass (La Muerte y La Brújula) by Jorge Luis Borges, the film is in English, and stars Peter Boyle as Erik Lönnrot the detective, Miguel Sandoval as Treviranus, his boss, and Christopher Eccleston as Red Scharlach/Zunz. Mexican actress Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez appears as Ms Espinosa/Harlequin.
The crew is the same as that of El Patrullero; the designer is Cecilia Montiel, the cameraman Miguel Garzon, the editor Carlos Puente. Stylistically it is quite different. The colours are impossibly bright, the locations monumental and exaggerated (particularly the police station – a maze of corridors built in Mexico City's main post office and the Convento de San Ildefonso, where Lonnrot meets his end).
Death and the Compass was originally a 55-minute drama made for Spanish TV/BBC in 1992, the quintocentenary year of the Spanish conquest...
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