Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1954) - Luis Buñuel

Film with which the great Aragonese Luis Buñuel continues to configure his particular sketch of the cinematography, and of the Mexican society completely, in which some relatively fresh news as far as topics are appreciated, and others will get cementing more, reinforcing the style that the director developed in Aztec lands. It is going to be based on this opportunity the great Buñuel in a literary work, novel authored by Mauricio de la Serna, in turn adapted by José Revueltas, and in whose adaptation also participated Luis Alcoriza, usual and memorable collaborator of the filmmaker, in which again will be reflected much of Mexico, its customs, its people, and events that never ceased to move the exiled Buñuel. The Aragonese genius portrays the history of two workers, two individuals who have worked all their lives driving trams, and when progress begins, and their livelihood will be replaced, they despair; during a drunkenness, hijack the vehicle, and undertake an unthinking and unlikely journey through the streets of the Mexican city, where various situations and characters will be parading. The film, very well accomplished, but without being among the best Mexican works of the filmmaker -to cite an example, He- continues with the particular Buñuelian tradition of showing the director's particular focus on the land that housed him, and In one way or another, did not cease to impact him.

                      

It starts all in Mexico, in a city that has a tram station, there are workers' labouring, among them Juan Godínez 'Caireles' (Carlos Navarro), and Tobías Hernández' Tarrajas' (Fernando Soto), who are informed that their tram will be dismantled, they lose their job. The friends are going to drown their sorrows in alcohol, then go to the local festival, where is Lupita (Lilia Prado), sister of the 'Tarrajas', and where the fun continues. Then, in the middle of their drunkenness, they decide to take the tram from the station, to give it a last trip, and without looking for it, they have to transport, in the middle of the night, all the attendants the party, besides many other passengers. It is thus that they transport some slaughterers, old gossips women, religious females, a drunken aristocrat, and even a whole room of school children, who climb the vehicle by hilarious error. The nonsenses do not cease, friends have to avoid a tram inspector, and then appears Papá Pinillos (Agustín Isunza), a former employee, also dismissed from the tram station, who pretends to prove that he still is valuable for the company, and will disclose them. While the people suffer from inflation, and while 'Caireles' is insistently courting Lupita, Papá Pinillos reappears, insists on betraying them, and almost dies of a heart attack. In an unthinking way, finally the tram is taken back to the station, and no one believes Pinillos about the kidnapping, everything is still normal.

In a film’s beginning fully identifiable with Buñuel's, a documentary-style beginning, a narrator off voice presents the geographic space where everything happens, Mexico City, "big city like so many of the world, is theater of the most varied and bewildering events, which are but pulsations of his daily life... ", says the introductory voice; is therefore a fully documental beginning, a film starting very of the style of the Spanish, and that closely resembles Los Olvidados. And as well that serves as a proem sequence, while the rich tradition of documentary flows, praises simplicity, because in that simplicity and everyday simplicity, can be hiding something wonderful, unforgettable, perhaps only for the protagonists, or perhaps for someone else. He also immediately connects the filmmaker with the theme of working people, the working masses who wander and diagram the stories, the bowels of Mexico City, those who climb on that tram every day, is a good connection bridge from a theme to another, a quite versatile beginning of Buñuel, whose efficiency and narrative economy was already well demonstrated. Great prolegomenon to continue the Spanish with his personal outline of Mexico, the diagram of the land and its people, its customs, as when we see the regional celebration of the piñata -where, by the way, the director slides a great traveling, of the few in the film-, popular festivals, because the film is based on a successful story, popular novel by the way. The usual things, everyday life merges with the strange, with the extraordinary, something as daily as discussions in public transport, affronts, insults, fights for higher prices of products, something very daily-life in the middle class or working people, fuse with death (the slaughterers and Papa Pinillos, although this one certainly does not die), elements not so normal. In this tale of agile rhythm, the marvelous reality emerges from the most unexpected situation, individuals change the streetcar sign, mistakenly climbing, and implausibly, a complete classroom of student children; the before empty and silent space, the micro universe, is now extremely crowded, crowded with noisy infants, a sample of the intense mood of Buñuel, delirious humor, almost absurd, but at the same time feasible. Buñuel's sharp edged humor is not absent in any way, and we will also see the American woman go up on the streetcar, la gringa as they call it, who, when going up and getting said that she will not be charged for the trip, suspects that there is communism behind that strange event; a mordant, unexpected and therefore effective humor.

Then of course comes the exquisite sequence of the pastourelle, where finally a vigorous and unusual surrealism is materialized, accentuating a dark onirism, which allows, more extraordinary and palpably than ever, that from the ordinary, the everyday, the real, is extracted very fluidly something extraordinary, something wonderful. Surrealism does not flow, it does not run as resolutely as in other occasions through the obvious resource of a dream, where all the onirism flows with free letter; now, although to a lesser extent, we find it timidly dissipated, finding of course its maximum expression in the said pastourelle. Then, many of the filmmaker's obsession themes flow together, religion, embodied in one of the most memorable, unbridled and delirious ways in the filmmaker, with the carnal Lilia Prado showing his abundant and turgid flesh, and that fun Lucifer, the fallen angel, finished everything with the mordacious phrase "this happens to put as God to anyone". Also, the strength in the script returns to be one of the pillars of the film, with mordacious and eloquent phrases, among which, just to mention a pair, we find "would kill a mule to pinch", or also "everything in excess is bad, even in efficiency "; again, as in many of the Mexican films of Buñuel, dialogues, ingenious and fresh, plagued with casual and corrosive irony, exhale a fluid eloquence that reflects the feeling of those times, are a constant watchword in this stage of the production of Buñuel, and this film will not be the exception, with its great colloquialism. The dialogues between Caireles and Tarrajas constitute the most solid base of this colloquial wealth, the most ingenious and endearing, with its occurrences, drunkenness, jokes, cries, moans and joys, are the heart of the social mass represented, are the nucleus of these humans, with their illusion, their illusion traveling in a tram. We find particularly similarities with Ascent to the sky (1953), and as Buñuel asserted with respect to this picture, in Mexico it was not surprising that a person came up a bus with a live animal, something that printed in the mentioned film; so, if it was a person with a goat on that bus, we now see a woman with a little dog, another echo to the feature with which she is paired. And of course, similarly to Ascent to the sky, we have to the enormous Lilia Prado, no longer in a bus, but in a streetcar, the analogue of the micro universe; are therefore obvious similarities to the mentioned feature, especially the microcosm, but I consider that this is far from forming a trilogy, along with ____, with clearly defined and differentiable norms of the rest of his works, as I have read more than once.

Technically, the first part of the film has a very dark conception, and not gratuitous, although everything happens at night, and dawn; Then, in the second part of the film, already with daylight, and with powerful illumination, the unplanned journey will continue, the picturesque sketch of various representatives of Mexican society, with, although scarce, a good camera-shots work that reinforces certain scenes and their tension. With regard to the topics discussed, we have an interesting sample of Buñuel's political guidelines, starting with the topic of the workers, of the exploited class, but also of inflation, with those drunkards that give us a sensible extract of the political affiliation, the thoughts in the feature by the filmmaker. Other complementary subjects such as impoverishment by currency devaluation, brutalization of the oppressed for the oppressor's luxury go flowing, while the camera performs medium shots during that seemingly trivial description of a drunk, and then move away significantly. Something from Alcoriza can be seen in the repeated allusions to liberal, revolutionary thinking, class clashes, basic concepts of economics, but from the perspective of the worker, the exploited, the adversary to the aristocracy. The sexual element in this case, for a Buñuelian work, is noticed strange and surprisingly parked, but never obviated, in the figure of a known for the Iberian, the carnal Lilia Prado, with those praiseworthy hips, ominous thighs, which Bunuel, in a very grateful gesture, has the right guess to very suggestively show in the aforementioned pastourelle sequence. Special mention aside for the duke of Otranto, devalued aristocrat, drunk, amusingly his participation is testimonial, mute, and the huge pig carcass flies his hat with its swaying. In this realistic and at the same time magical world, our protagonists are a kind of heroes, or antiheroes, people of town, perform any actions, but sometimes bad, like abandoning the entire classroom of students with their teacher. Some hurtful, colloquial phrases and expressions of that time flow, like the orphan's theme, Lorenzana, reflecting certain present prejudices. The vehicle, the journey, is an existential metaphor, of life itself, containing a sketch of vital topics, because we have religion, carnal desire, disappointments, death, aristocrats and workers, classes and class clashes, which forms a film somewhat different from His works conventionally considered, the outsider still shows his personal vision, his portrait of the land that welcomes him. It is a great colophon with which the Aragonese closes his film, tells us the rapporteur voice that everything is articulated around wonderful simplicity, and has been something forgettable for the rest, has been epiphanic for our protagonists though, and the final sequence is also very Buñuelian, always enemy of showing kisses on the screen, shows the only kiss in long shot, away, while the film culminates, and while the narrator off voice comes back, and we are returned to the objective perspective, the documentary. Very remarkable and appreciable feature, often cataloged as a minor picture, like so many Mexican works of the Aragonese, but always an interesting feature, container of the essence of Buñuel.

The River and Death (1954) - Luis Buñuel

As happened with so many other films by Buñuel in Mexican lands, we have in this opportunity a feature very often qualified like minor work, like alimentary film for its author, but that in turn, and always like the mentioned pictures by the Aragonese, stand for much more than those supposed defects for the connoisseur of the Buñuelian oeuvre. It is, despite any prejudice, this movie a very interesting work of its author, and for various reasons, being probably the main one that is the first time -or at least one of the most notticeables- in which the filmmaker folded his artistic interests to stipulations of the original author, of the writer of the story upon which the film is adapted. Associated again with his unconditional scriptwriter, Luis Alcoriza, the Aragonese genius adapts a novel by Miguel Álvarez Acosta, which portrays with rawness the way in which in a remote Mexican wasteland, completely desolated by violence and murders, two families are victims of ancestral hatred, which has claimed many victims of both clans, and now, the last two descendants must have a final confrontation, while one of them recalls a recent antecedent of the old enmity. One of the films that distinguish with greater prominence of the more representative topics of the Iberian, but that precisely for that reason contains much knowledge and novelties on the work of the referential director.

                 

The film begins with a prologue about Santa Bibiana town, there is a party, two godfathers are toasting very nicely, and then one kills the other for a misunderstanding. Far from that town, doctor Gerardo Anguiano (Joaquín Cordero), very ill, is taken care of by Elsa (Silvia Derbez), while in Santa Bibiana, Mercedes (Columba Domínguez), his mother, is humiliated by Rómulo Menchaca (Jaime Fernández); the latter one travels to the city where Gerardo is, and despite finding him crippled, threatens to kill him as soon as he gets better. Gerardo is recovering, and tells Elsa the origin of this animadversion, when many years ago, an ancestor of each family killed each other. And he continues to remember, his father, Felipe Anguiano (Miguel Torruco) courted a young Mercedes, and Polo Menchaca (Victor Alcocer), Romulo's father, had quarrels against the Anguianos. Although the venerable old fellow Don Nemesio (Jose Elias Moreno) preserves a little the peace, Polo kills one member of the rival clan, and nevertheless Felipe leaves to the exile, soon returns for revenge his cousin. Felipe leaves once again, but Nemesio's death causes him to return, Polo has unthinking truce with him, a truce that breaks when a brother of Polo forces a confrontation, in which both Polo and Felipe get killed. Gerardo finishes remembering, and finally comes back to the town, where he will have the confrontation, and final armistice with Rómulo.

The film becomes to a good extent, like so many exercises of Buñuel in the Mexican lands that received him during his exile, in a work that shows a documentary inclination, and is in that way that differs from his more traditional filmic openings, this is, with close-ups of a representative object or individual of the story to be presented. This time, the Iberian shows off his documentary facet with that exemplary proem, which displays the beginning with the moor while the credits flow, as an echo of what we will appreciate. Then he will provide us with the sequences and subsequent shots of that moor, in addition to the narrator voice in off, a precise background of the space where everything will happen, and ends up configuring a movie start that completely lands in the canons of the genre. The visual treatment of documentary that is given to the narrative is broken, sharply, at times with the behavior of the camera, which sometimes moves with some agility, others makes zooms-in to concretize close-ups; however, on other occasions it recovers its documentary behavior, crossing some passages of Santa Bibiana, reinforcing the treatment initially indicated. Eventually, a little, but resurges the narrator voice, which gets recovering the documentary focus when at some point it weakens, which continues to shape the document we appreciate from a Buñuel who was surprised, impacted by Mexican customs, a illustrated Spanish was surprised by seeing a procession carrying a dead man in his coffin throughout the town, and even to the house of his killer, and of course, by the violence as well. Similarly, the spectator, the public, the supposedly educated and civilized European eyes -particularly at the Venice Film Festival where the film premiered- got strongly impacted by the film, although the truth is that more than one Mexican film by Buñuel caused unthinking reactions in the auditorium, since the crude photographs in the form of films that Buñuel made of the land in which he was exiled undoubtedly disturbed them. The curious Buñuel, that great "man who shows" everything that moved him, positively or negatively, forms an interesting anthropological document, of the behavior of human beings, of violence, how irrational people can become over deeply rooted and inherited hatreds, resentments of others which they adopt, and which make all individuals subject to the collective.

As for the technical aspect, visually may be a little missed the photograph of the master Gabriel Figueroa -who shone exultively and gloomily, just to give an example, in Him, to which I refer again-, however you can find some good shots, some good chiaroscuros captured by the camera. The narrative structure has some novelty, although it is not the first time that in a work of Buñuel everything is based on flashbacks (just to give an example, perhaps He (1953) is the most exemplary Buñuelian work in this sense), and certainly, is not the time that the filmmaker makes it better, but it does not stop being attractive the narrative configuration, breaking the linear time plane, and integrating in a good way the different generations, the different time spaces that are united by ancestral hatred. Buñuel was in charge of asserting that the film, despite a certain treatment, is not a humorous picture, but it is impregnated with humor, black humor, as when you hear a character utter "it is not a good Sunday without its dead." Some phrases of the excellent script, courtesy of Maestro Alcoriza, reinforce that very black humor, strong and eloquent phrases, that perfectly describe the psychology of the protagonists, as when Felipe affirms "I am not afraid to the bullets but to the cowardice", or another condemnatory phrase, "we are all mourning in this town", a valid statement, in a place where human life is as little as the life of the rabbit that Felipe kills in a moment. And the efficient Iberian narrator immediately exposes this, when severe and illustrative contrast at the beginning of the film is reflected, with some godfathers who first drink very jolly, celebrate, toast, then for a small discussion, one liquidates his new Compadre, the same one who just a few moments ago kissed his newly baptized son. Obviously astounding the ease with which an individual is killed, the shootings and murders will happen in various places, in a billiard room, in the streets, in a cemetery, and all crowned with a bizarre custom. This has its paroxysm in the sordid procession that carries the coffin around several houses of the town, one by one, where there is some strange atmosphere, drinks, music, a few fireworks, ending in the house of the murderer, where he is required to leave, but following the law of the town, the perpetrator must cross the river immediately and, if he success, leaves the village; and of course we shall see more than one example of this, being, of course, Felipe the most eloquent, for, as his son Gerardo says, he crossed the river in both ways, alive and dead. And that water mass mythifies Santa Bibiana, because that river is a powerful border, beyond its limits, civilization returns relatively, beyond its borders breaks the myth of Santa Bibiana, it dictates the fate of the settlers. The river always has dreamlike music as accompaniment, even if it is only in Gerardo's stories, or when it must be crossed, is inextricable, either alive, swimming, either dead, in the coffin. The timeless river is a boundary element, divides everything, life and death, violence and loneliness, and whenever the river appears, even if it is in stories or references, surreal music flows, granting that halo of superhuman element, and of course, with the river and the dream music serving as great colophon for the picture.

Buñuel felt that, according to him, was working inside a corset for respecting the "thesis" of the novelist, who even corrected the script initially elaborated by Buñuel and Alcoriza, being this an exceptional situation, something that often did not happen to the Iberian; he asserted that he was greatly disturbed by the ending imposed, and Buñuel may not be mistaken, his annoyance may not have been unjustified, when he see that somewhat forced outcome, seeing that such a deep-seated hatred suddenly vanishes, when we see Romulo just completely changing his way of thinking, saying "to hell with the town"... to hell his generational honor... On the other side, it is Gerardo the epitome of the thesis by Alvarez Acosta, the educated individual, the lettered, the scholar who maintains that if everyone were educated, there would be no such behaviors, which disengaged the filmmaker. Promptly the role of Gerardo is defined, he almost cries desperately "I have studied", he does not want to be part of that barbarism, that irrational violence. Gerardo says, they are all sad victims of something bigger than them, an irrational and intergenerational hatred, and to maximize the contrast, the versed Gerardo appears in suits, with a coat and tie to the Candelaria party, where his great duel awaits him, where the appointment with death awaits him, where the "barbarians" look forward him. In this no man's land, the local priest preaches peace, the Lord's word, with a well-kept pistol in his cassock -by the way, he is the same actor who incarnated the priest in He-, in this land where whoever adverse to violence, as the Quiniela, of the few who are absent from the overfall, is of course called coward, chicken (hen) even by women, in the middle of barbarism, only the venerable old man Nemesio brings some peace, something fleeting. We do not find in this film the surrealism that is mistakenly thought to completely impregnate every feature by the director, here we find it in dribs and drabs, but we find it. However, his warm but recognizable winks will be noticed by the connoisseur of the Aragonese work, as a brief image of feet, one of his great fetishes, Felipe's feet, but even more noticeably, in the same sequence, the hen, Buñuelian element as few, appears suddenly -and unrelated, for the unprepared palate- in the middle of Felipe's clandestine encounter with Mercedes. Some critics claim that the film forms a triptych that is completed with Mexican bus ride and Illusion travels by streetcar, in the sense that the customs of Mexico are printed, a statement that I do not fully share, as I do not see such clear and well delineated links, as to consider a well-formed trilogy, a trio that shares common edges. It has been seen on more than one occasion, a strong parallel with the Yankee westerns, the clocks that refer to, for example, Only before the Danger, the horses and the fights to bullets that are reiterated almost to the point of the grotesque, and certainly It feels a halo of mentioned current, if not in excess. It is a film different from Buñuel, the picture that probably prints like no other a Buñuel that had to submit, to sacrifice his creative and artistic impulse to respect the original creator’s idea, to a Buñuel making a thesis film. Like almost all his Mexican films, described as alimentary or minor, but it encloses many interesting elements within the oeuvre of the Aragonese genius.