tierra sin pan (d. buñuel)

Buñuel’s early short film is a trip to a desolate corner of early 20th Spain, Las Hurdes, a mountainous region not that far from the Portuguese border. The film reveals a society steeped in poverty, which doesn’t look as though it has changed much since the Middle Ages or before. Children and adults go barefoot, the diet is impoverished, with the voiceover informing that very little grows in this region. The men go to seek work elsewhere, leaving the women to keep the villages alive. In a highly Buñuelesque touch, the film shows a donkey which has been attacked by bees and is on its last legs. At another point we are shown a sick baby and informed that it subsequently died three days after the filming. Coffins have to be carried across rivers, because the soil is too stony to dig. Everything is precarious and the similarities between standards of living in poorer areas of Latin America and Spain seem striking. Having said which I passed through Caceres, the nearest town, a few years ago, and the changes were remarkable: this is a society that has succeeded in more or less eliminating poverty, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the rural communities which Buñuel reveals in this 90 year old film.  

viridiana (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 6/6

Viridiana was the final film in a week of Buñuel. It marked his return to Spain as a filmmaker after years of exile in Mexico, and at the same time, it marks the start of his third incarnation as a director, the era that would produce a handful of copper bottomed classics.

It’s a remarkable film, full of complexity and what is known in Spanish as highly atrevido, a word that means bold or daring, but also implies a naughtiness, or a cheek. It has a narrative which is unafraid to twist and turn like a cobra, heading one way at one point, then changing gears. The film’s delirious closing sequence only features the protagonist, Viridiana herself, at the very end. The coda ending is like a throwaway sidewinder, which at once heralds the future of Spain and casts its past in the bin.

The story opens with the titular heroine Viridiana committed to a nunnery, seeking a life in Christ. Forced by her mother superior to visit her older but virile uncle, played by Fernando Rey, she finds herself drugged and abused by him. When it looks as though she has successfully escaped, she is brought back by a brutal strategic move on the uncle’s part, one which will wed her to life beyond the nunnery, whether she likes it or not. The film then switches tack, as Viridiana becomes a kind of Mother Theresa, welcoming the down and outs and outcasts of the local town to come and live with her on the estate. All this is then turned on its head again as her cousin, played by Francisco Rabal, comes to take over and modernise the estate.

In the course of all this, every single Buñuel trope is thrown into the mix. Perverse sexuality, the hypocrisy of religion, the marginals of society, and the overturning of the social order, depicted in a riotous scene which is like something out of Twelfth Night. Ancient European customs and class divides are represented and challenged. It’s a glorious jamboree of a movie which manages to conclude with the modern world subtly infiltrating and taking over the old world, as electricity and music flood the house and seduce, perhaps, a newly glamorous if tarnished Viridiana, her blond hair released like a dose of pure hedonism, the coming hedonism of the sixties. 

nazarín (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 5/6

Nazarín tells the story of a priest who is too virtuous for his own good. Adapted from a Galdós story, it’s a lumpy film, opening with a long sequence in the small community where the priest is based, before expanding in the second half into rural Mexico, as the priest is compelled to flee, followed by two devoted women who revere him. The opening half hour feels dialogue heavy and theatrical. The film struggles to catch fire, (until it does), and it’s only when the priest sets out on his odyssey that the film and the narrative gather pace. There is an obvious critique of the Catholic church, with the priest’s goodness proving to be his undoing (perhaps reminiscent of Greene’s The Power and the Glory), but more than anything the film offers Buñuel a chance to explore and reveal a deeper Mexico, a Mexico far from the big cities. His depiction of the campesinos and the pueblos is impressively filmed by DP Gabriel Figueroa, and this world, with its rogues and dwarfs is beautifully brought to life. The paradoxical majesty of the Hispanic architecture juxtaposed with poverty and struggle and the smallness of man in the face of the epic countryside, is captured as the priest’s calvary leads him and his followers towards a bitter end. The films of Reygadas are second cousins to Buñuel’s vision in Nazarín. 

robinson crusoe (w&d buñuel, w hugo butler)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 4/6

Since I read Robinson Crusoe a few years ago it has always intrigued me that Buñuel should have chosen to direct a version of Defoe’s novel. What Defoe’s tale depicts is, in so many ways, the antithesis of the classical Buñuel text. Buñuel is fascinated by society and the way in which the human vices and passions run beneath a veneer of civilisation. On a desert island with no-one for company, the only society Crusoe has is his pets. It’s perhaps indicative to see what Buñuel kept in from a novel which has to be cut to ribbons to fit the 90 minute format. One thing he retains is Crusoe, when leaving the mutineers behind on the island, telling them that they have one thing he lacked: human company and someone to talk to. The true challenge for the filmmaker is to make a film which doesn’t permit him to use his most effective skills: the dissection of human society. Instead, Buñuel pursues a study of loneliness and isolation, until the arrival of Friday. Crusoe goes through the wringer of existential despair, human activities which keep him distracted, self-pity, and optimism. This sequence, before Friday appears, is perhaps the more complex and intriguing part of the film, although it is slightly disturbing to see the way in which representation of native peoples, to use a phrase, does not appear to have developed greatly in the course of 250 years since Defoe. 

el (w&d buñuel, w luis alcoriza)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 3/6

El is the first of the Mexican films from this season which starts to feel like “Buñuel”. The dialogue-free opening five minutes set the scene. A priest washes the feet of a young member of the congregation. Francisco, a vigorous and wealthy middle aged man, surveys more feet, finally landing on those of the fetching Gloria and from that moment on it is amor fou, with Francisco determined to woo and steal Gloria from under the nose of his friend, which he does. What we don’t realise, and what seems in many ways a most modern approach, is that Francisco is an abuser, perpetrating both psychological and physical abuse on his new wife. The trajectory of this abuse is traced with subtlety, starting out as petty jealousy and then leading to violence and madness. The film is careful not to show Gloria as a victim; as is so often the case in abusive relationships, she is both hopeful that things will get better, and ground down, bit by bit, as they don’t. Buñuel and Alcoriza’s denouement doesn’t occur between Francisco and Gloria. Francisco follows a woman into a church, where he goes completely mad, with the madness conveyed from his point of view as he views the congregation mocking him, in his mind. This set piece scene is edited with comic glee. Other moments, such as when Francisco sits alone on his elaborate stairwell, contemplating killing Gloria with a stair rod, have real menace. There’s a wonderful final touch, when we revisit a supposedly cured Francisco in a monastery. Only the lie of the cure is given by the zig zag walk he adopts, which echoes the walk he made up the stairs when he set off to kill his wife. It’s one of those small details which give the film an added weight, and cleverly undercuts any pretence of a ‘happy ending.’

On imdb, someone claims that the cowled actor in this final sequence is actually Buñuel. It’s also worth noting that there are echoes of Vertigo in the bell tower scene, although this should be the other way round, as Vertigo was made in 5 years after El, and some claim Hitchcock stole/ was inspired by El. 

susana (d. buñuel, w. manuel reachi, jaime salvador, rodolfo usigli)

 Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 2/6

There were mild guffaws in the audience as Buñuel’s overripe plot reached its melodramatic denouement. The narrative revolves around the tempestuous titular character, who escapes from the reformatory and is then taken in by a wealthy, kindly family on their estancia. The fetching Susana proceeds to cause havoc, as the master, played again by Fernando Soler, his son, and the head of the estancia all fall for her charms, with predictably chaotic results. The ending is so banal it’s positively subversive, as Susana is rearrested and everything returns to an idealised normal. However, in Susana one can begin to trace elements of Buñuel’s later work. The examination of the way in which a seemingly stable and righteous social order is vulnerable to Dionysian attack. The subversive power of sexuality. The fragility of civilisation. All these elements are at play within the film, which Buñuel again directed from someone else’s script. 

el gran calavera (d. buñuel, w. janet alcoriza, luis alcoriza, adolfo torrado)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 1/6

Buñuel had to leave Spain after Franco’s defeat of the Republican forces. He went to Los Angeles for a bit, then headed to Mexico to direct Gran Casino, which was a flop. According to Wikipedia, he then spent three years surviving on money his mother sent him and was contemplating giving up filmmaking, before he got given a break when he was drafted in to direct El Gran Calavera, featuring the Mexican actor Fernando Soler. There’s nothing particularly surreal or Buñuelesque about El Gran Calavera, a moral comedy about a lazy, wealthy family whose paterfamilias, Ramiro, played by Soler, has turned into a drunk following the death of his wife. His family sponge off him, until he gets so drunk he nearly dies, and as a cure he is tricked into believing that he has lost his fortune and the family has been compelled to move into a poor neighbourhood. The moral fable is given a twist when he learns about the deceit and turns the tables on his family. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film, over 70 years old, is how funny and engaging it is. The narration is taut, the storytelling is lean and the script is endowed with humour and moral complexity. These are comic characters, but they are also three dimensional. The vision of Mexican society is curious with the class divisions noted, but, the film contends, far from insuperable. It would be interesting to see if a contemporary remake would have any chance of being in any way plausible. 

belle de jour (w&d buñuel, w. jean-claude carrière)

That curious moment in history when men were permitted to make contentious films about women, something that is less and less condoned. And perhaps, looking at Belle de Jour, one might say that it was a prime example of why this shift has happened. Does it really make sense for a male director to make a film about a beautiful woman who has perverse fantasies and decides to take up prostitution for no very good reason? Is this either plausible or praiseworthy? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that Belle de Jour is an uncomfortable watch, which might be a virtue was as well as a vice. Is this not actually a film about Freud and bourgeois manners? No-one comes out of the film looking good, from Deneuve herself to her husband to the madam who runs the very genteel brothel Deneuve decides to work for. Part of the complexity of the film arises from the fact that the director would not appear to be in the least bit interested in naturalism or psychological accuracy. Rather, he is using the story of Severine as a lens through which to gaze at the fucked up nature of desire in the civilised world, something the film undoubtably achieves. Few have had the nerve to go beyond naturalism to explore the subconscious mire of the modern mind and watching Buñuel now, albeit it feels dated in some ways, one is also made aware that when a director is willing to use cinema as a tool to prise open consciousness, it leads to the most unexpected of places. 

that obscure object of desire (w&d. buñuel, w. carrière)

Buñuel’s famed late seventies parable of the gender wars is a curious shaggy dog story of a film which appears to be about a wealthy older man trying to get his end away with a fetching, poor younger woman. In these banal terms, it might be thought that this is another dubious sex comedy, something out of the apolitical wing of the Aries studio, or primetime seventies ITV scheduling. However, from the outset, we get hints, in spite of the light-hearted tone, that something stranger is occurring. Firstly, the film is framed in flashback. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu boards a train at Seville and begins to narrate a tale that will last all the way to Madrid. The framing device lends the piece an unreliable air: the narrator is always going to present the story, which is triggered by his throwing a bucket of water at a young woman before the train leaves Seville, from his point of view. Secondly, radically, the woman in question, Conchita, is played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). This is a device worthy of a Milo Rau or Pirandello. It’s unsettling, awkward, it leaves the viewer struggling to work out why two in place of one. The story doesn’t flow with the same naturalness as an ordinary romantic tale. As viewers, it feels all wrong. Finally, in the background, things keep getting blown up. These are times of terror, with young idealists belonging to bizarre political sects blowing up cars and kidnapping people. 

At the same time, the tone, framed by Rey’s laconic style, feels humorous. As he narrates how he is frustrated in his desires at every turn by Conchita, he gradually turns from being a rouê into a sap. The ‘natural’ course of events is constantly disrupted, subverting the Hollywood trope which still exists today of charming older man seducing beautiful young starlet. The old order is overthrown by the twin Conchitas, whose individuality is too much for him, eventually driving him to violence. To question the heteronormative dynamics so mercilessly in a mainstream movie was and still is an act of sly subversion by the director. Just as much as the young radicals who exist on the fringes of the film, he wants to blow up our concept of normality. The words ‘blow-up’ leads us towards Antonioni. What we can take form that generation of white male directors, which also includes he likes of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini, is that, even if they owed their place to a system that was skewed in their favour, they were prepared to play out their concerns, anxieties and doubts on the screen. This is not the film of a man comfortably settling into his pampered slippers. On the contrary, it’s a film that seeks to shake up that idea of comfort, to ridicule it, to blow it up. 

los olvidados (dir. buñuel)

Sitting in the NFT, watching a fifties film about Mexican City street kids, the last thing you anticipate is a shot of the South Bank, filmed from just outside. It's just one of the touches Bunuel throws in to deconstruct what might otherwise have been a regulation docu-drama, the forerunner of so many. The opening shots show Paris, New York and London, before arriving at Mexico City, as the film maker declares a global perspective to this local tale. To watch it in this destabilised era of gun crime is to witness a point made: until the underlying causes of poverty are tackled, the things we are about to witness will continue. Bunuel furthers his perspectivisation with surreal additions. A child rises up out of his own dream to observe on his future. Hens and cocks feature rather more than you'd expect. According to the notes, his plan to feature a full orchestra on an abandoned construction site were shelved, but these touches all help to give Los Olvidados something that lifts it out of the ordinary, in spite of the fact it is so rooted in the ordinary. The old man in Amores Perros crossed my mind. His cinematic ancestor might be the blind folk singer, carting his drum across the wasteland, as cruel as he is kind as he is desperate. Like everyone else in the film. Urban living in Mexico City is probably no easier now than it was then.