ÉL A-
aka: This Strange Passion
Mexico (100 mi) 1953 d: Luis Buñuel
Buñuel went to Jesuit school in his native Spain, but came
of age in Paris during the 20’s, commenting that “a religious education and
surrealism have marked me for life.” His early surrealist films UN CHIEN
ANDALOU (1928) and L’AGE D’OR (1930) were considered shock treatments, a
synthesis of Marx and Freud, anarchists of the spirit and liberators of the
psyche. The Surrealists abandoned a straight narrative as a form of
repression, preferring to allow the unconscious to speak through images,
dreams, and fantasies, seamlessly inserting them into otherwise realistic
stories. Perhaps only Jean Genet surpassed Buñuel in exploring his character’s
fantasies. Freud was reportedly fascinated by Buñuel’s early work, but
the Depression and the demand for escapist entertainment left no one to
bankroll Surrealism. Buñuel was all but absent from directing films in
the 30’s and 40’s, but worked dubbing, producing, and working in the film
department at the Museum of Modern Art. LOS OLVIDADES (1950) returned
Buñuel to an international stage, winning the Best Director prize at Cannes in
1951, offering a brutal portrait of slum kids in Mexico City, exploring their
world of savage cruelty, where his meanest character in the film is a blind
beggar. In the tradition of Freud and the Surrealists, Buñuel saw his
characters less as victims of their environment than as pawns in their own
murderous and sado-masochistic fantasy lives. His fascination with
ugliness and violence (like the Spanish Inquisition) is almost stereotypically
Spanish. A surrealist-tinged melodrama, “El” is the masculine, definitive
article in Spanish, where Buñuel and co-writer Luis Alcoriza have devised a
deviously clever adaptation of the Mercedes Pinto novel, a near Hitchcockian
tale about jealousy, paranoia, and female subjugation, suggesting that in the
extreme the person ultimately subjugated is the male himself, locking himself
into a narrow, self-imposed prison of his own making, ironically a view shared
very much by the existentialists, such as Sartre’s No Exit. Reportedly French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's
favorite film, literally overflowing with Freudian imagery, he was known to show
the film to his students as an example of paranoia.
Buñuel understood obsession like no other, turning it into
black comedy, perfectly integrating delusions and fantasies into everyday ordinary
existence, where a middle-aged, devoutly religious aristocrat, Francisco
(Arturo de Córdova), a man who has abstained from sex his entire life, is
assisting the local priest wash and kiss the feet of young male altar boys,
when he’s literally stunned to discover the attractive feet of one particularly
beautiful woman, Gloria (Delia Garcés). Wasting no time, he immediately
steals the heart of this woman out from under her architect fiancé Raul (Luis
Beristáin), where swayed by his wealth they are quickly married. What
happens afterwards is told in a flashback to Raul in a state of near panic, as
she finds it hard to believe herself. On the night of her honeymoon, when
her new husband approaches her in bed, perhaps to avoid the inevitable that he
has been resisting his entire life, he accuses her of thinking of Raul before
falling into an endless stream of jealous rage, castigating her for having
previous lovers, blaming them for this incessant hostility, where Gloria is in
shock at his behavior, but he later apologizes profusely. Francisco
refuses to allow her to have friends or even see her own mother for fear they
will turn her against him, believing he must possess her all to himself,
basically locking her up in a cloistered life where he continues to suspect she
is being followed by former lovers. What is initially startling is taken
to even greater extremes, becoming inherently ridiculous, but given a
Kafkaesque spin when no one believes her and she sees no way out, not even her
mother or the local priest, as Francisco portrays himself as such a decent man
in the community. Even Gloria was fooled at first by his elegant and
gracious manner, but it’s as if he has a personality disorder, continually
turning into his Mr. Hyde persona, actually threatening her life. In one
of the most extraordinary sequences, a likely influence on Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958) five years later, the two climb up to the top of a Spanish mission’s
bell tower, a supposed favorite place of reflection and meditation for
Francisco, offering magnificent views of the city, where he grabs her by the
throat and threatens to throw her over the railing. Both ÉL and Vertigo deal
with male hysteria, control and possession of women, leading to an illusory
sense of male identity, where both are about the inability of a male
protagonist to control a female object of desire, exposing underlying delusions
and outright psychoses that have likely been there all along.
It’s important to remember that in the eyes of the church
there’s no such thing as divorce, that marriage is a lifelong commitment, an
unbreakable oath that is taken before God. As grotesque a turn as can be
imagined, where does that leave Gloria? While the first part of the film
is told from Francisco’s perspective, the second half shifts to Gloria’s
vantage point. In her small religious community, divorce is scandalous,
requiring evidence she doesn’t have, much like the scene of a crime, as the
family’s honor and reputation would be disgraced and ruined if she abandons her
husband, so Francisco continually pleads forgiveness at the feet of
Gloria. To the outside world, their lives seem normal, but to the
unstable mind of Francisco, it’s all about domination and submission, and the
long term effects of sexual repression, especially well into adulthood.
We get a dizzying account of Francisco’s personal struggle within himself to
maintain an equilibrium, where he demands complete obedience from his wife, but
even when she dutifully obeys completely, he continues to rage against the
world, developing a personal contempt for all humans, as in the end you only
end up being disappointed. His souring view of a rancid world fits into
his delusions that everyone is conspiring against him, where people are
laughing behind his back, accentuated by the swirling Bernard Hermann-style
hysteria from musical composer Luis Hernández Bretón and the sumptuous black
and white imagery (especially the sweeping panoramas of the town of Guanajuato,
reminiscent of Hitchcock’s voyeuristic gaze of San Francisco) from legendary
Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. When Gloria finally has the courage
to leave him (after several near death experiences), he goes after her with a
gun, like a man possessed, his face sweaty and his hair continually falling out
of place, where he has the look of madness in his eyes. When he sees her
with Raul, he follows them into a church service, but when he approaches them,
his sanity escapes him. Buñuel cleverly blends a reality of church
serenity with a quickly unraveling, out of control, fictitious surreal world,
much like Bergman’s HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), where the parishioners, altar
boys, and even the priest start laughing uncontrollably at him, happening all
in his head, as if shamed because they can somehow see what a disgrace he has
become, where his surging torment within himself only feeds a hallucinated
world of visionary horrors. Buñuel has the last laugh, however, as in the
final shot it is the director himself (appearing in his own film like
Hitchcock) and not Arturo de Córdova who is under the monk’s robes. The
audience can amusingly decide for themselves whether they think a solitary life
in religious penitence has “cured” Francisco of his personal obsessions.
