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.