AKA This Strange Passion

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DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés

PLOT: A Mexican landowner seduces a woman into marrying him, but his paranoid jealousy quickly poisons the union.

COMMENTS: The career of Luis Buñuel breaks cleanly into three periods: the avant-garde (or first French) period, the Mexican period, and the renaissance (or second French) period. He begins in Paris with the revolutionary experiments of Un Chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or, and Land Without Bread; moves to Mexico where he directs commercially-oriented films after an unsuccessful flirtation with Hollywood; and then, in the twilight of his career, returns to France to produce masterworks such as Belle de Jour (1967) and Discreet Charm of the Bourgousie (1972) with the assistance of new collaborators Serge Silberman (producer) and Jean-Claude Carrière (writer). Of these eras, the Mexican period, from 1947-1965, is the longest—and it can itself be split into early and late periods, as Buñuel again achieves international notoriety with Viridiana in 1961, and re-emerges into surrealism with 1962’s The Exterminating Angel.

The Mexican period is often overlooked, and it’s undeniable that Buñuel was far less experimental in this era, placing commercial realities above personal passions, and sneaking in surrealism and social commentary where he could. But Buñuel was honing his craft in Mexico, and these films are still fascinating to see the development of his aesthetic. Naturally, he also made some great movies in these years, among which the psychologically astute Él (which translates in this context as “he”) is a standout.

The film begins, without dialogue and somewhat mysteriously, with priests ritualistically washing the feet of young men on Maundy Thursday. The gaze of our protagonist, Francisco, scans a line of boys’ feet and priestly hands until it alights on a pair of high heeled shoes supporting shapely calves; his eyes then turn at a right angle to travel vertically up the body to briefly meet the eyes of a young woman, whom we will later learn is Gloria. What this opening means—with its nods to the director’s foot fetishism and his complicated relationship to Catholicism—is a point for academic debate. But no matter; the story immediately takes a turn for the melodramatic, following Francisco as he seduces the demure Gloria (stealing her from her fiancé, an associate of Francisco’s), while expressing his vain desire to recreate his ancestral real estate empire. Francisco’s irrational jealousy emerges as early as the honeymoon, where he gets into a fight with an old friend of his bride’s that the couple coincidentally encounters. Gloria quickly realizes she has made a terrible mistake. Things escalate through beatings, a dangerous scene in a bell tower (which anticipates Vertigo), and finally a disturbing and menacing bit where Francisco gathers up surgical equipment for purposes you can certainly guess. In the end, Francisco has a complete psychotic break, allowing Buñuel to deploy some light surrealism (via editing) to portray the triumph of paranoia over objective reality. (This climax occurs, naturally, inside a church.) An ironic epilogue shows Francisco, now convalescing in a monastery, his demons at least temporarily at bay, zig-zagging down a straight garden path.

Buñuel‘s own process during the Mexican period follows the same path: he follows the inevitable line of conventional narrative, but zigs and zags into his own obsessions. The director claimed that Él was one of his most personal works, and we know from his wife Jeanne’s autobiography that Buñuel himself suffered from irrational jealousy and sexual repression. Thus, he identifies with Francisco, but only in a masochistic and self-reflective way: he’s too perceptive to deceive himself, as his protagonist does, into thinking he’s always in the right. The source novel, by a woman speaking from personal experience, reportedly focuses on social critique of the Mexican patriarchy and its mistreatment of women; this subject interests Buñuel as well, but he leans into the character study aspect of the material. It is a way to exorcise his personal demons, and despite the conventionality of the approach, Él is at heart a typically vituperative strike by Buñuel at the hypocrisy of the human heart.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a dark, troubling, classily produced melodrama. It may not have the showy, surreal touches of Buñuel’s best known work but it still packs a punch.”–David Brook, Blueprint: Review (Criterion Blu-ray)

Él (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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