‘Pepita the Gunslinger’ Review: Luisana Lopilato Takes Aim at a Dark Argentine Legend

With the life of Margarita Di Tullio—better known as “Pepita the Gunslinger”—you could easily make several seasons of a TV series. Over the course of several decades, she was involved with or connected to organized crime, prostitution, cabarets, and the various other minor enterprises of Mar del Plata’s nightlife. And she left her mark, her imprint, on all of them. Wisely, Lucía Puenzo chooses a brief period in her life to portray the woman in all her facets: strong, independent, and not someone to mess with, but also sensitive and, at times, even frightened. The journey Puenzo, the director of XXY, constructs in her film is, if you will, one of liberation and independence—a journey that forces Margarita to make some hard and difficult decisions at a point in her life when everything seems to be hanging by a thread.

While the film quietly moves back and forth between fact and fiction, its story broadly follows several real-life circumstances in the life of “Marga” (a terrific Luisana Lopilato), sometime around the mid-1980s. By the time Pepita the Gunslinger begins, she is already a seasoned woman of Mar del Plata’s nightlife, working as a copera, the companion of customers in bars and cabarets, and the partner—and victim—of her pimp, El Cuervo (Alberto Ajaka). She is also pregnant, perhaps by him, perhaps not. Di Tullio (no one called her “Pepita” back then; the nickname came later) is no longer working night after night with a rotating clientele. Instead, she has a single customer: Germán, a captain who “services” her on the ship docked at the port, where she goes to work with a group of girls. Played by Claudio Tolcachir, he seems genuinely in love with her and promises to buy her a house of her own.

With a surprisingly dark and somber tone, and a pace more suited to a drama with tragic overtones than to a conventional crime thriller, Puenzo focuses on Di Tullio’s attempts to break free from El Cuervo, setting up her own nightclub and bringing some of her girls with her. But despite repeated attempts at negotiation, she can never quite make that happen with her pimp. In the midst of her efforts to escape what is ultimately a more psychological than physical form of domination, Margarita takes her girls to private parties organized by a local judge, Perkins (Marcelo Subiotto), perverse situations where a prostitute can even run into her own father. And, above all, they must watch out for a suspected serial killer who is murdering many women working the streets along the roads in and around the city.

Almost Ripsteinian in its combination of harsh realism and melodrama from the underworld, Pepita the Gunslinger makes few concessions to the commercial cinema typically devoted to notorious figures from Argentina’s criminal annals. Beyond the violent events that eventually arrive, when the tension becomes unbearable the film mostly takes winding, gloomy paths populated by sinister, immoral characters—a catalog of Argentina’s criminal decay that has nothing remotely glamorous about it. Quite the opposite in fact. In that sense, the film bears some resemblance to Historia de un clan, Luis Ortega’s miniseries about the Puccio family, which gave that story a similarly oppressive and perverse atmosphere.

Throughout a career spanning film, television and literature —in Argentina and in Mexico— Lucía Puenzo has almost always worked in an uncomfortable, somewhat dense register, with little interest in seeking the easy approval or sympathy of the average viewer for her intriguing characters. Films such as The Fish Child, The German Doctor, and the more recent The Exposed form a body of work in which something sinister finds its way into every sphere of life. In Pepita, those spheres are politics, the police, the justice system, and the underworld.

While Lopilato has something of a tough-as-nails heroine about her, the film never quite presents her as one. She is, rather, a survivor, a woman slowly learning—often the hard way—how to carve out a place in the world, one in which she does not have to depend on a man to survive. And that is the brutal epic being told here, a sort of armed struggle to escape what is likely to be a terrible fate. The actress commands every frame as Margarita. Her coarse way of speaking, the way she walks while carrying her pregnancy, her yellowed teeth and penetrating gaze all leave an indelible mark on every shot she inhabits.

Ajaka, meanwhile, has already made us accustomed to these characters on the edge, men of an intensity as brutal as it is unbearable. And the much-in-demand Subiotto finds a thousand shades in a character that another actor might have reduced to a simply sinister figure. Charo López, Camila Peralta, Gala Nisenson and Adela Buendía also shine as the members of the group of women who accompany, help and fight alongside Di Tullio in her silent but fiercely intense battle against El Cuervo. In somewhat less developed roles, as members of the criminal gang, Esteban Bigliardi and Gustavo Bassani also make their presence felt.

Pepita the Gunslinger is neither a biography nor a conventional crime film. In fact, it engages with the usual requirements of the genre from a distinctly sideways angle. More than anything else, it is a violent, abrasive melodrama about the darkest side of the night, unfolding in those shadowy corners where the light never seems to reach. Or, when it does, it comes from the muzzle flashes of guns or the unforgiving headlights of police cars.