I got my copy from Butch Perez at lunchtime, opened to page 1, and did not stop reading until I finished the whole book. So no work was done today, and it was a day very well spent.
Intelligent, wicked, sometimes vicious (Bernal did not spare anyone, especially himself), this anti-biography is presented as a wide-ranging conversation between filmmaker Ishmael Bernal and his closest friend, the scholar and screenwriter Jorge Arago. Mercifully many of Bernal’s targets are long-dead, because he murders them.
Arago started the project in the 1990s by asking Bernal to keep a journal. After Arago died several years ago, their friend Angela Stuart-Santiago took on the project, and the result is awesome.
Think of it as Truffaut/Hitchcock, except that Truffaut/Hitchcock doesn’t make food shoot out of your nose. And a bit of the Warhol diaries. I had to stop reading several times to recover my breath. (And I have a tiny cameo in the book! Proof that I read every word.)