Mexican Bus Ride (1952) - Luis Buñuel

We have a Luis Buñuel's unusual film here, as to a certain extent were all his works made in Mexican lands, a film in which he continues to shape many of his distinctive film stamps, but in which also various issues are concretized that continue limiting and hindering the complete and total development of the Aragonese artist. On this occasion, the filmmaker left out those who until shortly before this film were one of his pillars in his shootings, the spouses writers Alcoriza; the story we are focusing on came from Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre, with whom a strong friendship was already well forged with Buñuel during his stay in the Student Residence of Madrid, where meetings of prominent artists of the time took place. The aforementioned poet is the origin of the film, married to a very wealthy Cuban woman, when embarking with his wife on a trip by bus, both faced different experiences, experiences of different kinds, and that somehow had to have moved the poet, because he adapted his experiences to a script, with the help of Buñuel and some others. Simple story, tells the experiences of a young man who has just married, and his mother, just about to die, has not prepared his will; fearful that his brothers would take advantage of the situation, undertakes a trip to find a lawyer who would make the will; different adventures will cross the young man on his journey.

             

In a remote town called San Jeronimito, the customs at a wedding include that the bride and groom must spend their honeymoon on a nearby desert island. Oliverio Grajales (Esteban Márquez) and Albina (Carmelita González), newlyweds, are embarking to this island, but the young man finds out that his mother, seriously ill, has relapsed and is close to dying. He immediately returns to see his old mother, Oliverio knows that his brothers, Juan (Roberto Cobo) among them, are waiting for the mother to die to share the goods, and she, who wants to leave everything to the youngest member of the clan, an infant, asks him to please bring an attorney to legalize her last will. Oliverio takes a bus trip in search of the lawyer, on the bus also goes the beautiful Raquel (Lilia Prado), the deputy Eladio González (Manuel Dondé), among others. The trip begins, in which a woman gives birth in the middle of the journey, in which Raquel all along wants to seduce Oliverio, the bus driver, Silvestre (Luis Aceves Castañeda), more than one stop performs, like in the birthday of his mother, despairing the hurried Oliverio. After separating Oliverio from the others, and being alone with Rachel in the bus, finally she manages to seduce him. Oliverio arrives with the counsel, acquires a document that will help fulfill the will of his mother. On returning to San Jeronimito, the brothers already want to distribute the inheritance arbitrarily, but he will not allow it.

So it ends the Spanish film, a film whose beginning has something of documentary -something common in many Buñuelian features of this stage of the artist-, shows us the small town where everything happens, San Jeronimito, whose inhabitants live simply, they apparently suffer poverty, but actually they all have a lot of money; this thanks to the copra palm, whose sowing generates income comparable to having a milch-cow. That short proem serves to enter in that context. The playful and frolicsome music already indicates the character of the film from the beginning, fun, light, subtle, hilarious. The first thing that we see represented is the wedding of Oliverio and Albina, a wedding, an event that always compends customs and much of the folklore of the community of whatever land or village where it develops (a notable master of that is Kusturica). Always showing a narrative economy, in just over ten minutes, Buñuel explained a good part of the movie, the sick mother interrupts the honeymoon of the newlyweds, and requires the obligatory trip of the new husband Oliverio to solve the crisis; in this simple film, that is the motor that originates everything, all the comic actions -or tragic, death of a girl; or lamentable, the siblings almost forcing the dying mother to sign...- are triggered as a result of this. The humor is born of hilarious situations, warm humor that rubs the absurd, like all adults, suffering and enduring to get the jammed bus from a bank, when a child, a girl, playing, guide the oxen and manage to pull the vehicle almost effortlessly. Likewise from the initial moments the omnipresent bus appears, that will become during the film practically in the micro universe where many of the most important events will happen, and the tenants of that transport one by one will populate the vehicle, with their presence and with their occurrences. That bus becomes the environment where the most significant events happen, that micro universe is home to almost everything, as in other filmmakers, and respecting the great distances, we have seen, from the first exercises of Roman Polanski and his cinema of minimal spaces, or the great Fellini in Y la nave va (1983); always an interesting resource in the right hands.

In that bus, everything happens, and everything is opposed, because on the way a woman gives birth, a new life comes to the world, and on the return, a new life is extinguished, the dead girl in the coffin puts funeral share, although Buñuel was in charge of subtracting more significance or fatal relevance to that detail. Simplicity, simple people, people of town, simply what can happen in any day, in any town, with any people, that is the whole movie about. With this pretext, and as in other films, the filmmaker sketches, with the initiative of the poet Altolaguirre, the community, the small society, which in this smallness, summarizes all Mexico, with its significant figures, the deputy who is late to his election and is repudiated, holder of a somewhat forced and barren eloquence, wielding more than once a gun which he never uses; the Porfirian old man who longs for past times and the return of his lands, among other significant figures. As natural and simple as these adventures in the film are narrated, were the vicissitudes in the real life of the filmmaker shooting, with the money of the wealthy Cuban wife of the producing poet, running out and seeing the director forced to change his final, to use shameful scenarios of cardboard for the final descent of the bus. Incredible how he had to finalize the film, because again, due to budget constraints, something not new at all for the giant Iberian director, had to modify the film differently from the original conception of the filmmaker. One of the unmissable features of the Buñuelian cinema is also displayed, the bestiary of the Aragonese, animals that go significantly -and literally- parading in the film, animals and humans living in that bus, goats, sheeps, and of course, the hen, Buñuelian par excellence that so prominently flow not during a film, but throughout the whole oeuvre of Spanish, as, just to give an example, we can remember in The Young and the Damned (1950). Thus, from the simplicity of the experiences of a bus trip of the poet Altolaguirre with his wife emerges everything we appreciate, as he had the impulse to turn his adventures into a film, but he wanted only one person to be the director, his friend Buñuel; like so many artistic works, it was born this one, drinking from the life itself, of supposed littlenesses, since the experiences of the poet, including seeing a children's coffin on his bus, were the ones that inspired this film, in which Buñuel himself collaborated in the adaptation of script.

As always, there is another watchword of Buñuel, we have the dreamlike element, the surreal component, the dream of Oliverio, which begins, of course, in that bus, which we will see oniricaly full of foliage, where the sexual and lustful Raquel tries to seduce him, then the dying mother appears, in an elevated position, and very symbolically connected to her son by an interminable peel of apple, an allegory of the umbilical cord from which Oliverio is finally being liberated. Strange and ambiguous is the figure and relationship of mother and child, for to a certain extent a Oedipus complex is insinuated in Oliverio, who, after his mother's death, exchanges her face for that of longed-for Rachel. Likewise, and following another sequence of the dream, Oliverio first sees Albina, in almost Marian representation, being pushed into the water by her husband; moments later she will arise again, as reborn, emerging renewed from the waters, but with the face changed for the carnal Rachel’s one; that figure, the exchange of faces, is a classic exercise of surrealist artists, and that we have already warmly seen sketched in Susana (1951). Rachel, the primordial one in the film, embodies the sexuality that will never be lacking in a Buñuelian feature, she is carnality and lust, desire, an essential element in the universe of the Aragonese director, and her stubbornness is remarkable, is a continuation of the hermaphrodite being of An Andalusian dog (1929), of Modot in The golden age (1930), or obviously of Susana; she does not stop until she gets what she wants, sex, seduce the young Oliverio at the significantly named cusp "climb to heaven", then, and once achieved her goal, discards him as a worn shoe. The last shot that we see of her is now harassing Eladio the deputy, again with stubbornness... it is quite predictable in that will finish that deal. The dialogues and efficiency of the Alcoriza spouses are missed by some of the connoisseurs, although the dialogues, for the writer, do not resent much, full of adages and village-like rogueries that vertebrate a film that passes quickly and smoothly. The camera, without reaching a high level of performance, shows interesting displays, with some travelings that streamlines the visual aspect, with some locations that recall the camera in hand; what was said, without being unfortunately a more striking development, as in other films of his was appreciated, is set an attractive work. Certainly that ending feels abrupt, sudden, although it is fair to point out that the version to which I have had access, apparently is ten minutes shorter than the "official" version, but it is undeniable however that these factors (budget cut) mortified Buñuel, the budget cut definitely altered the denouement of the picture. Many of his cornerstones are present, the most important, the main ones, but again, external factors hindered the work, which however did not preclude a very appreciable feature of this extraordinary Spanish director, which carries his clear imprint, and from whose realization the author kept pleasant memories.