Luis Buñuel

(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.

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Much as I go back-and-forth on Luis Bunuel’s movies, I went back-and-forth on The Exterminating Angel throughout its duration. After a mystifying introduction to the characters, the premise reveals itself: our dozen high-society characters are suddenly unable to leave the living room of the mansion in which they’ve gathered. Why they can’t leave is unimportant, which is completely in-keeping with the kind of surrealism that Bunuel practised, but somewhat at odds with contemporary audiences more used to a genre explanation, as perfunctory as it is. (I sometimes think that the best thing that genre literature brought to the world was a way to anchor metaphors into some kind of rationality, even in fantasy fiction. Zombies may be a great way to discuss the mindless conformity of the modern world, but they are also interesting in their own right as mortal threats, and it’s that duality of genre fiction that makes it both accessible and profound depending on the level sought by creator and audience.) Knowing that The Exterminating Angel will never explain its situation, the film is free to go through the motions of its plot, as its subjects are in extended captivity: the lies, the loathing, the contempt, the violence—as mayhem plays out in a gilded living room, it’s obvious that this is meant to have deeper levels of interpretation. If you’re not interested in playing Bunuel’s’ game, however, the film is only intermittently interesting. By the time it concludes with the ill-justified freeing of its characters, it’s both interesting and not interesting at the same time: in the nebulous fog of surrealism, something happened but it seems ripe to be swept under the rug with few repercussions nor any reason to care. The premise of The Exterminating Angel has been reused many times in many other places, but the original could use a bit of tightening up as well.

(YouTube streaming, June 2020) Consecrated cinema classic The Young and the Damned does have a few things going in its favour. For one thing, there aren’t that many movies set in late-1940s Mexican slums. For another, there aren’t that many strictly neorealist films in writer-director Luis Buñuel’s filmography—while the film does sport one surreal sequence halfway between reality and dream, much of the film is as gritty and realist as possible, fully embracing the life and environment of its street-urchin protagonists on their way to becoming hoodlums. At 88 minutes to present a full-featured narrative (not always a given in Bunuel films!), The Young and the Damned doesn’t overstay its welcome. The film is resolutely not that optimistic about human nature and can occasionally become harrowing viewing. But, after generations of film critics have designated this as a classic, is it still worth a look? Probably. Maybe, if you can tough it out.

(Kanopy Streaming, October 2018) I’m not saying that there isn’t some potential in a movie taking on religion and rich people as satirical targets. But I’m saying that Viridiana isn’t it—not with its muddled message, punching down to the homeless as objects of scorn, fuzzy dramatic arc and few overriding commitment of cohesion. But then again—it’s from writer/director Luis Bunuel, meaning that consistency may not be the point. The plot, as loosely as it can be called as such, has to do with a noviciate visiting her wealthy uncle, avoiding his seduction, staying at the mansion following his death and the arrival of her half-cousin, trying to morally uplift some vagrants who then trash the mansion, avoiding another sexual assault and then settling into a ménage-a-trois with her half-cousin and a servant. Or something along these lines—I wasn’t exactly paying rapt attention to the film by then. There is some supposedly comic material here (usually mixing piety and vulgarity, such as when the homeless re-create The Last Supper) but it usually feels haughty and forced. I strongly suspect that the different social context matters: The Vatican designated the film as blasphemous, whereas there’s little here that modern audiences would find particularly shocking. (The film itself is still a bit off-putting, what with its multiple instances of sexual assault.) It doesn’t amount to much—Viridiana may have some potential, but it feels obvious and mean today, much of the satirical intention has been stripped away by the decades.

(In French, On TV, October 2018) I liked Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie quite a bit more than I expected, which is saying something given my usual reluctance toward surrealism and/or French cinema of the 1970s. Writer/director Luis Buñuel does have a few surprises up his sleeve, though, the best of those being the dry black humour of a film in which anything and everything can happen. Once you accept that Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie is pure surrealism (which doesn’t take all that long, even taking into account that 1970s French bourgeoisie was weird enough), the rest is simple joy as the film zigs and zags between dreams and absurdity. Violence abounds, but the film remains riotously funny even as the black comedy gets even darker. The flipside is that nothing means much, so it’s not really worth watching the film for characters or plotting as much as a series of sketches featuring more or less the same cast. Which isn’t to say that the film is meaningless comedy—while it’s strongest when it’s at its funniest, there’s enough of a graphic (at times unsubtle) illustration of hypocrisy to keep thematic engines running. Even for plot-centred viewers such as myself, meaningless isn’t the same thing as worthless, and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie gives us enough narrative breadcrumbs to sweeten its own surrealist intent. I liked it more than I thought I would. In fact, I may even enjoy a repeated viewing in a few years.