Wuthering Heights (1953) - Luis Buñuel

Buñuel approaches in the present film a work not often performed by him, and not because he adapts a literary work, but because he adapts a text of international fame, wide recognition, something he had not done before, and that we would only see as a close exercise in the later Robinson Crusoe (1954). Some controversy surrounded this film, mainly by the adapted text, full and plagued by darkness, sordid characters, slaves of their passions, as the first text of the film is indicating us, beings that touch the macabre, death and sex, the powerful obsessions made this book a little less than damned for its time, the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. More than one adaptation had the novel, with different styles and approaches, but the present version remains as one of the most valuable, among the ones that best achieved and best captured the essence and spirit of its tormented protagonists. The film prints a part of everything that happened in the book, as it was known worldwide, the story of a family, of conflictive affectionate relations between one to another, a woman in love with a man of animal character, long gone, but now married to another man, and with whom she has begotten a child; when the initial individual reappears in the life of the family, great emotional storms will arise among all members of the tormented clan.

                 

Eduardo (Ernesto Alonso), his wife Catalina (Irasema Dilian), and his sister Isabel (Lilia Prado) live comfortably on a rainy night, a relaxed existence with no worries. Alejandro (Jorge Mistral) suddenly bursts with violence, breaks into the house, he is the adoptive son of the family who fled years ago, and Catalina immediately becomes uneasy over his unthinking presence, unmindful, professes his feelings for him, before the impotence of her husband. Soon they take walks together, and soon it is well known that Isabel is also in love with him, and Alejandro, after Catalina refuses to flee with him because of her pregnancy, only by spite decides to accept Isabel as his wife, disregard the negatives of the nana María (Hortensia Santoveña). But their feelings have not changed, as Eduardo's impotence and supplications grow, it is then that Catalina, unable to shake off her passion, falls ill in the middle of the unsustainable situation. Alejandro is going to live with Isabel at the house of Ricardo (Luis Aceves Castañeda), a drunk relative who attends impassively to the torments to which she is subjected, he hates Alexander, but is unable to face him. Almost as inevitable inertia, comes the moment of childbirth, and Catalina dies giving birth to the child, bringing great suffering to Alexander, who enters her grave, lies next to the corpse, and finally is killed by Ricardo.

The economy and narrative effectiveness of Buñuel is soon printed in the film, when the first sequence shows the impulsive Alejandro bursting into the aristocratic residence, but more so, the stubborn character undoubtedly breaks the glass of the door, does not accept negative of the nana, his character is from the first moment, wild, uncontainable. In the same way we see his female analogue, Catalina, who without the slightest regard, professes with her words and her actions her almost animal love for him, the characters are quickly and powerfully delineated. Even on the face of her husband, she could not repress professing her love for the prodigal son, her passion is overwhelming, it is a violent, destructive passion, that can only find final consummation in that, in destruction, in death. It is pertinent to indicate that the writer of this article could not read the original work, the novel by Emily Brontë, in which, with great probability, and with the normal distances from literary to cinematographic art, it has been possible to approach with greater detail to the origins, the provenance of the nature of each character. With that in mind, we can only hear briefly how Catalina's strange feelings were born, truncated feelings, being adoptive brothers, she apparently always felt that impulsive and fervent passion for Alejandro, but being adopted, he was humiliated and despised by the aristocratic family, having her to choose marrying Eduardo, seeing the contempt of which Alejandro was prey over his miserable origins. We also have Isabel, the frail sister of Eduardo, who is moved by the suffering of the animals, in love with the fierce Alejandro, unrequited, suffering, but since not being a participant of the passion, she is not condemned. We have right there by the way Lilia Prado, who, after seeing the exercises in Illusion travels by Streetcar (1954), and her carnal interpretive imprint, her turgid physical attributes, is perceived as if she had been the ideal choice for the tormented and fiery character of Catalina, and perhaps with that image in mind, is felt almost lost in the harmless role of the innocent Isabel. Another personage to enrich this bizarre human fauna is Ricardo, the drunkard, a drunken, impotent and useless coward, also part of the sordid ancestry of that house, that reinforces the accumulation of obsessions, of pathologies, in that bizarre ecosystem where everybody is exposed to the wild impulses that dominate them.

The core of the film is the destructive and impossible romance between Alejandro and Catalina, both are renegades, soul mates that reflect each other, and this is concreted more forcefully with the phrases spelled, "our love is not of this world" it is asserted, "I love Alexander more than the salvation of my soul", she says, stern and powerful are the statements, the dialogues, which denote an overflowing passion, and everything happens in the first sequences. Even when Eduardo asked his wife if her passion would cease if he killed Alejandro, she claims that she would continue to love him after death, and so the characters and their complexities are already well-drawn. It is a destructive but seductive love, an unstoppable, irrepressible love that no other human can understand, and these dialogues help us to understand how that love can only lead to death, can only find final fulfillment and be consumed in death, as effectively ends up happening. We are faced with a variety of amour fou, crazy love, a subject that always seduced Buñuel, and the surrealists in general, the love that for one reason or another is truncated, that does not come to happen, to consummate, or in any case is a love that is not consumed as a normal love, which does not have a maximum realization as normal lovers have; there is now a dark solace, it is indeed an enjoyment that will only reach its peak with the extinction, with the death, self-destructive feeling that will consume its unfortunate members, who, as the initial label immediately indicates, are not free individuals, nor are they independent, but they are slaves of their passions, those passions are the ones that move them, manipulate them. And Alejandro is not far behind in the strength of his phrases, when he talks about Isabel, he says "if she did that (biting him), I would tear her teeth one by one", also heard "chase me, drive me crazy, show up", another insane dialogue, the efficiency in the dialogues is something that always characterized the genius of Talanda's films, although in this case did not collaborate with his greatest pillar in that section, the great Luis Alcoriza. Eduardo completes the protagonists, Ernesto Alonso feels close to his other collaboration with Buñuel, the two years later The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), with his characterization fragile and impotent, bordering on cowardice, and curiously shown from the first frames as a entomologist, we see how Buñuel is once again pouring himself immediately into his characters.

As for the staging itself of the film, which is, as I indicated, what I can most comment, Buñuel in a positive way deploys a plastic darkness from the first sequences, shade and rain, the exteriors are invaded by that dark fury of nature, preluding the dark and savage passions that dominate humans. More than once we will see storms, gloomy natural storms, a great resource to exteriorize all the violent savagery that shakes inwardly the characters, prey to their violent passions, and this has its extension in the spectral and ghostly residence of Ricardo, by force converted into the home of the couple Alejandro and Isabel, what also exudes darkness, evil. It is very interesting how Buñuel, who has already acquired filming experience in Aztec lands, has the ability to disseminate, to shed the shadows throughout the environment in which the protagonists perform, powerfully reinforcing the darkness of the characters, the personalities of the characters. If there is something regrettable on the picture, yes, it is the marked abuse of Wagnerian music, Tristan and Isolde. Seldom seen, the way the sublime Wagnerian notes are used in anodyne moments, a touch that can offend some amateur palate of the German master. The excessively arbitrary use of the famous composition is something that Buñuel soon shook responsibility of, asserting that he did not participate in the musical insertion in the assembly room, something that is perceived as very probable. There is a Buñuel's success, although perhaps the merit is not fully for Talanda's genius (the color was about to reach Buñuel's filmography, a year later with Robinson Crusoe, nevertheless the color choice is not completely elucidated), comes to realize the film in black and white, feeding the hermetism and gloom that plagues the environment and the characters, the gothic tone that permeates the film, and the novel itself, which made it worthy of admiration for patriarchs of that artistic stream. In this dark world of torments, traumas, grudges and resentments, happiness shines for its absence, there is a presence of psychological masochism, for the characters seem to find refuge in that torment, in that trembling swirl of suffering, a suffering for which however they have no choice. If something can be blamed on the film is that it finally seems that its characters have more force than the film itself, whose development and outcome finally seems to fade, losing strength. In this case, with the subject treated, and with the indivisible that was the carnality of the topic, Buñuel has no alternative but to show kisses on the screen, one of those details that always avoided, and now, more than one kiss had to portray in his frames, but always concealed, in his own way. There is a certain religious lukewarmness, a detail is the nana who sanctifies herself before the affirmations that listens of Catalina, although in this opportunity the religious subject is eclipsed, since the passions are all that governs personages and history itself. We have a surreal ending, what a denouement, according to the seen sordidness, one death after another, one corpse on the other, the couple is together in death, only then their love is finally consummated, as they always knew, and how they were announcing it, and the director slides a detail of overlay of an image, lukewarm surrealism. Buñuel seems to have not felt too much pleasure or complacency for this work, as it let us glimpse the few words that he dedicates in his memoirs about this film, but nevertheless it configures an appreciable work of the Spanish, interesting adaptation of a referential text, and to the point was already to begin to use the color the Iberian; is a work perhaps not between the best produced by the filmmaker, but definitely necessary as part of all his filmography.