Abismos de pasión [Wuthering Heights] (1954)

(With French Subtitles, On TV, October 2021) I got interested in Abismos de pasión because it’s directed by Luis Buñuel, but there’s a lot of fine print to read in his bibliography—it’s not all surrealism and wild concepts, and his mid-1950s Mexican phase is far more conventional than most of his other work. Still, conventional isn’t necessarily boring, and so Abismos de pasión ends up being a Mexican retelling of Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights, transplanted in a countryside much unlike the rural English estates of the original. Then there’s the execution, because when Buñuel decides to go for melodrama, he truly commits to it—the performances are emotionally heightened to an almost parodic degree, and the in-your-face score practically becomes a character in itself, telling the viewers not just how to feel, but giving them permission to go all-out on the love, the tears and the indignation. Despite a relative paucity of plotting, Abismos de pasión is a wild ride in barely 90 minutes, all the way to the overwrought shotgun finale. This is clearly nowhere near the top of my favourite Buñuel films, nor is it anywhere near most critics’ assessments of his work, but it does have a few things going for it.