Compose Yourself: Luis Buñuel's Mexican Period
Informal writings on Buñuel collected over the last eight months
Lest my thoughts and ideas on some of Buñuel’s more under-seen films disappear into the Letterboxd ether, I’ve collected capsules on nine of the director’s films here.
Susana: The Devil and the Flesh (1951)
The lurid conceit fits well with Buñuel’s amoral objectivity: the similarly amoral Susana is never made an allegory beyond what she’s established as, an institutionalized, then escaped, woman. For all the mutterings of evil portent—the weather, the sickly mare—the family isn’t invaded, rather their repressed sexual re-and-misdirection has trouble containing itself in the presence of an outside party, and thus the film adopts a jitteriness that it never recovers from (nor should it), the painted-on, plastic smiles of the ending driving it all home. It’s a cloistered setting, one of Buñuel’s beloved dilapidated family manors, and its isolation appeals even to the son, who though handsome, young and intelligent, would rather play entomologist out in the country with mom and dad than attend school in Mexico City. Susana moves from the womb-like grotto of the well to inside the father’s gun case as her legs are smeared interchangeably with mud and crushed eggs, embracing the dirtiness that her temporary benefactors only nominally clean away. So many whip-pans that come to focus on her; she’s the staunchly immovable center (which doesn’t frame her as some sort of heroine, another masterful stroke of characterization), so no wonder they can’t wait to get rid of her.
El bruto (1953)
The halfway peak between Los olvidados’ street-level objectivism and Nazarin’s questionable transcendence, engaging in high-melodrama that’s beholden to American noir beyond just the chiaroscuro of the almost eternal nighttime of the film. Buñuel’s Mexican period can play like an analogue to Ulmer, a resounding cheapness that works to actually buttress the material instead of hindering it. Location shooting gives way to ascetic interiors that prioritize the actor, while also stressing the incongruousness of the conflict, the landlord’s perspective expectedly blinkered and oblivious, his home an impersonal affirmation of status absent of any warmth: he wants to evict tenants so he can “build a place for father and I,” but the old man is nothing but an albatross, neglected and insulted. Bruto himself, objectified via the faux-benevolence of the bourgeoise, is like Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground, a sometimes unwitting arbiter of violence, who spends the second half either on the run or hiding out, respite coming as a brief fantasy of domesticated life with the daughter of whose father he killed, the two projecting their future against the dilapidated brick walls of his erstwhile shack. It’s so characteristically rich: the meeting between Bruto and the landlord occurring at a slaughterhouse where the latter is visibly out of place; and then, Buñuel doing a frame-within-a-frame of the former and Katy Jurado, except the frame is hanging meat. Jurado herself is not unlike Ida Lupino at the close of They Drive By Night, a catatonic survivor as the ultimate pyrrhic victory.
Él (1953)
Some of Buñuel’s most functional, dry direction, in service of one of his most disturbing depictions of destabilizing tunnel-vision, a prioritization of one (or two!) cinematic building-block in each scene while the leftover diegesis remains self-effacing. Sound trades on and off with movement, performance blots out the setting, bourgeoise cardboard castles punctuated with marble religious figures and Daliesque curlicues that—apparently—are based on Buñuel’s childhood home. If it’s a rather straightforward thesis on masculine façades, it’s at least brought forth with similar deceit, where dialogue often cuts out when the camera jumps to the other side of a surface, like when Fransisco’s courtship of Gloria continues from behind a pane of French door glass (Buñuel was an aspiring entomologist at one point, after all); later, a scream with only an implied source will echo throughout the empty house. Full surrealist tilt only really manifests in spurts, the churchgoers vacillating between laughter and stone-faced worship. Is it kind of a Stromboli riff? Gloria’s conversation with the priest could’ve easily been capped with “compose yourself!” That final image too, a zigzagging gait towards a void at the end of a garden path is like the exact opposite of Karin ascending Etna.
La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954)
Shambolic and good natured, the two streetcar workers drunkenly moving along their old line are not unlike the holy fools of The Flowers of St. Francis, with similar affecting instances of powerlessness cropping up at the edges. More coincidental than touristic, the trolley tracks nevertheless provide a vaguely predetermined sojourn, which not only brings various far flung areas of Mexico City closer together, but also makes apparent the bourgeoise bureaucracy throttling everyone: inflation, layoffs, starvation. One particular clash with corn bootleggers and price gougers is like the uprising in Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, but what’s even more unsettling is its irresolution, Buñuel moving on to the next vignette, the next iteration of inequity just around another twist of the tracks. Buñuel’s perennial nonalignment has its most fascinating embodiment in Papá Pinillos, an old man forced out of his job on account of his health, who tries—and fails—to kiss ass to get back in with his former superiors; when one has dedicated their life to an industry, their premature expulsion will of course encourage the worst habits, though those who’ve facilitated such behaviors plead ignorance. So then the trolley becomes a microcosm, a church and a slaughterhouse, going nowhere in particular, but bringing the working communities together when their own employers otherwise preclude them from doing so—a considerable facet of the film is the benevolent refusal of payment, which the ruder careerists and American transplants deride as some sort of anticapitalist plot. It’s a filmic catalogue of reactions, from orphans being teased to an audience howling with laughter at a cheaply produced passion play. Buñuel treats the more impulsive emotions (laughter, sadness, anger, frustrated confusion) with a sympathy that wisely pauses itself when the arbiters of all these mini-conflicts move into frame.
Abismos de pasión / Wuthering Heights (1954)
Barrels forward so that the mostly histrionical performances are absorbed into its frenetic rhythms (Ernesto Alonso is disappointingly wasted, considering his perfectly dandyish performance in Archibaldo de la Cruz). Recalls Rivette’s own adaptation in its creative and resourceful methods of bringing these childish behaviors to the fore; Rivette had his babyfaced actors cosplay adulthood with outmoded habits and dress, Buñuel’s revert to schoolyard ostracism, keeping secrets and burying time capsules. The gnarled trees and mossy manors stink of rotten aristocracy, which infects all participants, even down to the young boy who is more than willing to bash in his aunt’s skull with a rock if she comes too close. The last act is bizarrely moving, full of prayers and elemental mysticism (and perhaps a latent desire for necrophilia), before Buñuel blows it up with a shock of violence straight from L’Age d’Or.
El río y la muerte (1954)
“There’s never a Sunday without a stiff,” and even the priest carries a gun, so the little town’s beloved tradition of cyclical revenge gets the approval of God through its sheer frequency. Buñuel’s preoccupation with coffins and their analogues—one character is introduced in an iron lung—is afforded one of its more adept narratives, even if it mounts towards a relatively saccharine reconciliation between the warring parties: processions move their way through villages and up and down the river, distilling the peripatetic funeral rites of Las Hurdes and Mexican Bus Ride into a series of linked images. It’s basically a western, colored with the genre’s potential for a rich, local lexicon (the bush, Vicar’s Alley, The Tata), though it also skews towards a world entrenched in modernity, a counterpoint of sterile, even brutalist environments when compared to the dusty, ramshackle village. One son ensnared in the blood-feud claims he’ll run to Mexico City, instead of hiding out in the wilderness of the other side of the river like his father before him (the isolated but tense setting is a concise antecedent of The Young One), basically claiming he’d rather return to a bourgeoise safety-net than anything else, which he does at the end regardless. In that sense, it’s maybe one of Buñuel’s most surprisingly damning films, though veiled in genre signifiers.
Ensayo de un crimen (1955)
Like a bunch of miniature proto-Vertigos strung together, almost in a choose-your-own-adventure style, three possible victims whose fates are decided by subjective circumstances that our protagonist fancies himself to be the objective controller of. Its storybook construction springs forth from its multiple framed narratives, testimonies within testimonies, various murderous impulses whose specific (imagined) methods are engendered by similarly specific formalities. Archibaldo’s invariable motivations are what encourage the Vertigo connection, a concerted effort to double each potential victim from her predecessor, before life interceded. The film should be grouped with Hitchcock, as well as Peeping Tom, though it plays as an implicit inverse, where the masculine privilege still prevails even as the deed isn’t actually committed: suicide, an intrusive group of “yankee” tourists, a jealous lover, an elevator shaft, all supersede Archibaldo, though he’d say otherwise. What’s most marvelous is that Buñuel doesn’t judge the catalyzing trauma, but he does the closed-off opulence that it occurs within, as you watch some rich boy artist fail to bring his bloodlust to fruition.
Nazarín (1959)
Buñuel’s surrealism is at its best when it coaxes out the multifaceted properties of a given space, any sort of destabilization achieved by contrasting activities beyond more basic binaries (the sacred and profane, etc.). Such mutability is enacted right from the opening in the hostel’s courtyard, the whiplash of an impoverished everyday made visible with the camera’s frequently recalibrating focus, settling upon streetwalkers and orphans alike. Father Nazario’s home not only has a window frame that functions as a door, but this very entrance comes to resemble the porousness of the confessional partition, and then later, his living space is made the site of a conflagration. The film continues within this design, the repeated rejection of Christianity representing a new world that our narrative center is not yet—or may never be—acclimated to. Of course Buñuel is wary, and Nazario’s occasional impatience doesn’t exactly make him a paragon of goodness, but the surrounding environment is littered with violence and gunshots, shrieks that beg for miracles, plagues whose malignant capabilities nullify the need for a priest. It obviously elevates itself to deliver its own stations of the cross, but atomizes such biblical portent across its three protagonists, the potential of a benevolent Christlike figure, and the attendant pitfalls of such undeniable hubris equally embodied by Nazario, Andara and Beatriz.
The Young One (1960)
At first, the raccoon in the chicken pen seemed like an overly didactic and even mishandled allegory, but it really functions as an antimetaphor, with no comparable figures in the film, the singular outsider experiencing the opposite of what this brief documentary inset offers. These pre-Viridiana films are a fascinating sublimation of what’s otherwise a welcomely pummeling directorial disposition, the physicality absorbed by the the performances, the camerawork, the setting, with no veritable forays into the hallucinatory or tangential (trying to avoid “surrealist” as best I can here), deriving its workaround formal and even painterly subversion from the pungency of its conceit: the way the flashback literally invades Traver’s head is a really effective distillation of trauma, the sounds of the past initially mingling with the island’s diegeses; the prevailing isolation of the two cabins vaults beyond its arguable western connection to something approaching science-fiction, especially when Evelyn dons her beekeeping dress and tends to the hives, a real potent moment of visual dissonance; then there’s the shotgun which almost has a mind of its own, shooting a skinned rabbit from its hook, blowing holes in the bottom of a boat. The hostile environment can only be traversed by compartmentalizing, the queasiness of the ending kneecapping the faux-reconciliation that Zachary Scott so disturbingly achieves, and established at the beginning when the grandfather’s death is easily glossed over.