Like many of the productions of the great Buñuel in Mexican lands, we have in this film a very atypical work regarding what someone not very knowledgable of all his films, could wait, to what conventionally is known as the main edges of the Aragonese cinema. Buñuel performs something certainly surprising within his work, adapts the world-known story of Daniel Defoe on the English adventurer lost on an island for decades, a story in turn adapted to the script by Hugo Butler, script in which the filmmaker himself collaborated, with the natural distances and closenesses of one art to another, from literature to the cinematographic field. The adventurous and impetuous Robinson Crusoe, an Englishman of a certain ancestry, contradicting his father, travels the world in search of slaves, adventures, and ends up wandering on an island, apparently uninhabited, in which he overcomes his loneliness, his anguish, until he meets another human being, a native he calls Friday, who becomes his servant; together they will face cannibals, dangers, until finally other adventurers arrive to the island, and get back to civilization. Buñuel expresses not a few thoughts about a work he claims never interested him too much, for what seduced him, he affirmed, was the story itself of Robinson, his adventure, his solitude, his circumstance.
The protagonist talks about his past and how he came to the island, then we see a marine storm, and Robinson (Dan O'Herlihy) on the island, alone. Fearful, isolated, he sees the remains of his shipwreck, and rescues some elements. He finds other animal companions, a feline and a canine, and adapts to his environment, hunting, discovering by accident the agriculture, obtains a herd of goats, the months go by quickly. One day he falls ill, dreams of his father, who reproaches him for leaving home, and denies him water. Time does not stop, he builds more things, becomes independent, even builds a raft, tries to sail, without too much success, and with surprise sees that his cat has given birth. When celebrating an ephemeris, celebrates drinking rum, gets drunk, hallucinates. The years follow each other, he stops searching for salvage ships, his dog dies, loses his sanity, until one day he finds a human footprint on the beach. He sights cannibals and among them rescues a native, whom he calls Friday (Jaime Fernandez), makes him his servant, teaches Western concepts, civilizes him a little, overcoming his distrust of the indigenous, become friends. More time passes, they face another group of cannibals, and one day, another boat arrives, with white men. After creating an ambush, Robinson manages to seize the power of the ship, and returns to mainland, with Friday.
The beginning of the film, quite cinematographic, very clearly, with that voiceover, already tells us the nature of what will be the first part of the film. The immensity of literature in this case is insurmountable, and the voiceover abruptly manifests itself repeatedly, a resource almost antagonistic, considering the solitude of the protagonist, and the constant recurrence of the resource is certainly detrimental to the illusion or effect of total isolation and solitude, of hermetism that was sought. Buñuel, we could say, was defeated by the enormous distance from one artistic world to another, using that voiceover, an excellent resource, when well-deployed, at other times; here, the gigantic challenge made the filmmaker surrender, and overused that atypical resource in him, enemy of the most authentic cinema, as the genius Hitchcock had asserted. Here, unfortunately, and throughout the first part of the film, when Robinson has no one to exchange dialogues with, it seems that the filmmaker did not find another way to capture Robinson's mental universe, his actions, his evolutions and discoveries. In the first part, to add to the repeated intrusion of the voice, there is an equally repeated music, which I consider to be quite an extra detail, ending up destroying the secrecy of Robinson's solitude, one of the few defects found in the film. By the way, being in theory this, a film in its first part "mute" (Robinson can not cross word with anyone), the double language in which the picture is shot flows with unusual ease, and it is pertinent to point out that the present review is based on the English version, that not few changes took place, unforeseen, having even given apparently the situation that Buñuel did not get to see the finished film. It is the first color film shot by Buñuel, and he curiously, however, asserts did not have too much to do in the elections of certain frames, or colors properly, subjects related to the camera, being forced to comment, regarding an article about him published, that was not his
palette (colors) the one that flows in the feature, was the
palette of Alex Philips, cameraman. When using a novel system in their materialization, the director had to send the films and shots daily to Hollywood to be processed, generating this a never experienced delay, dilation in the shooting time for the Spanish.
As indicated at the beginning, Buñuel was never attracted to the novel, instead was attracted by the story of Robinson, his extraordinary case of solitude, where all conventionalism disappears, where all previous concept is fading, and new concepts flow, where the innermost and most intimate fiber of the unfortunate -or fortunate?- shipwrecked is discovered. The subject seduced him, the aristocrat who changed luxuries by total exile, an island where his anguish, his despair, increasing, tries to find relief in the bible, until reaching the paroxysm, screaming in the rock, trying to find God and finding the solitary answer of his own voice. And of course, after the loss of Rex, his only link to the outside world, sanity is disappearing, flows the powerful and symbolic sequence of Robinson on the beach, dropping his torch to the sea, extinguishing the fire, symbol of reason, lucidity and sanity, which leave room for impotence, defeat, resignation. Buñuel was attracted to show the human being in such an extreme and epiphanic situation, and he does so by leaving a wink, his wink, his entomological taste; for after all, as an entomologist, in the film Buñuel he performs a study of man, his interiority, of himself, like Robinson leaning over some insects on the island. The human being assimilates his circumstance, man evolves, returns to the most primitive state, like a caveman, re-discovers agriculture, learns to make his bread, builds his own things, manufactures ceramics, pipes (this is different in the book), umbrellas, fences, cages, even a bomb, although the process of invention or manufacture, naturally more elaborated in the novel, is omitted. But everything changes when is extinguished every hint of company, and is that Friday changes everything radically, save the white man, he makes Robinson discover himself as human, virtues, friendship, loyalty, love, with him, reflect, complement each other, almost a fascinating quijote-to-sancho process takes place, as the aristocrat civilizes the savage, dresses him -at the end Friday is fully dressed-, teaches him to smoke, theologizes him, but deep down, it is the savage who saved the desperate son of the civilization, which left his fire extinguished on the beach, when the most basic instincts threatened, like cannibalism. There remains the paradoxical question of whether civilization saved the savage, or vice versa, because with Friday rediscovers Robinson happiness, the metaphor of total solitude is over, completely outside of civilization, rediscovering his own being, his interior, doubts about God, returns to love their human condition, or as Buñuel said, "they feel proud of being men once again."
And Robinson nevertheless always has a humanity that never loses, returns the bird to the nest, yet has the malice inherent for a civilized being, he never separates from his gun, when Friday rejects the bread, his immediate action is to bring the musket; it seeks to incarnate with simplicity of resources, the whole spectrum of human virtues and defects. At the equator of the film, as if dividing the story, he loses the shelter of the Bible, despairs, screams in the sea, is the key moment. On the other hand, the roles of one and another race are soon defined, the first action of Friday, after being saved from the cannibals, is to prostrate at the feet of the white man, his savior, his supposed civilizer, when in fact it is Friday who is largely the salvation of Robinson, will rediscover himself the shipwreck man. However, all this is exceeded, in an environment where everything external has been reduced, even the relationship master-servant is gradually evanescent, to arise friendship, strong friendship, almost brotherhood. And of course, we have the cat that gives birth her cubs, life is still there, even in those circumstances, there is life, life is born, marveling both protagonist and viewer not knowing, as Robinson says, where she met the father. The film is an indirect but determined tribute to atheism, as man, being completely isolated, is slowly losing not only sanity, but all conventionalism, including of course, one of the greatest, religion, all crowned and maximized with that dialogue about the Bible, which offers no answers, where the savage, the uncivilized, makes the master, the white, the civilized Christian falter with his inquisitive question, which has more Buñuelian nuances than Defoe. The dream, again, and as on so many occasions with the Aragonese, is the free way for surrealism to flow, which by the way flows very eagerly in the film, the closest to his legendary known dream-style, and always taking into account that the filmmaker wanted to stick as closely as possible to the book, and he certainly did. "I did not want to make a Robinson
a la Buñuel," he says, because that surrealism does not flow at all. He is here, shaping the novel in his own way, respecting the book, the original work, but naturally embodying his stamp, his personal imprint, with omissions -such as the return to civilization of the adventurers in the book, after the island at the end, missing detail in the film- and with his resrources, did everything possible. Tasty surrealistic glimpses emerge, like Robinson being rejuvenated and well-groomed in a singular reflection in the mirror, and of course, that formidable sequence, leaving the island, with the barks of Rex, where the best Buñuel returns, where without words he is able to express a whole world. It is another unusual work by Buñuel, what a versatility of the filmmaker, this is, along with a few others, and with the obvious distances from one picture to another, a film that at first impression would not be recognized as a work of its author, and precisely for that reason, it is a very interesting and seductive feature.
Like many of the productions of the great Buñuel in Mexican lands, we have in this film a very atypical work regarding what someone not very knowledgable of all his films, could wait, to what conventionally is known as the main edges of the Aragonese cinema. Buñuel performs something certainly surprising within his work, adapts the world-known story of Daniel Defoe on the English adventurer lost on an island for decades, a story in turn adapted to the script by Hugo Butler, script in which the filmmaker himself collaborated, with the natural distances and closenesses of one art to another, from literature to the cinematographic field. The adventurous and impetuous Robinson Crusoe, an Englishman of a certain ancestry, contradicting his father, travels the world in search of slaves, adventures, and ends up wandering on an island, apparently uninhabited, in which he overcomes his loneliness, his anguish, until he meets another human being, a native he calls Friday, who becomes his servant; together they will face cannibals, dangers, until finally other adventurers arrive to the island, and get back to civilization. Buñuel expresses not a few thoughts about a work he claims never interested him too much, for what seduced him, he affirmed, was the story itself of Robinson, his adventure, his solitude, his circumstance.
And Robinson nevertheless always has a humanity that never loses, returns the bird to the nest, yet has the malice inherent for a civilized being, he never separates from his gun, when Friday rejects the bread, his immediate action is to bring the musket; it seeks to incarnate with simplicity of resources, the whole spectrum of human virtues and defects. At the equator of the film, as if dividing the story, he loses the shelter of the Bible, despairs, screams in the sea, is the key moment. On the other hand, the roles of one and another race are soon defined, the first action of Friday, after being saved from the cannibals, is to prostrate at the feet of the white man, his savior, his supposed civilizer, when in fact it is Friday who is largely the salvation of Robinson, will rediscover himself the shipwreck man. However, all this is exceeded, in an environment where everything external has been reduced, even the relationship master-servant is gradually evanescent, to arise friendship, strong friendship, almost brotherhood. And of course, we have the cat that gives birth her cubs, life is still there, even in those circumstances, there is life, life is born, marveling both protagonist and viewer not knowing, as Robinson says, where she met the father. The film is an indirect but determined tribute to atheism, as man, being completely isolated, is slowly losing not only sanity, but all conventionalism, including of course, one of the greatest, religion, all crowned and maximized with that dialogue about the Bible, which offers no answers, where the savage, the uncivilized, makes the master, the white, the civilized Christian falter with his inquisitive question, which has more Buñuelian nuances than Defoe. The dream, again, and as on so many occasions with the Aragonese, is the free way for surrealism to flow, which by the way flows very eagerly in the film, the closest to his legendary known dream-style, and always taking into account that the filmmaker wanted to stick as closely as possible to the book, and he certainly did. "I did not want to make a Robinson a la Buñuel," he says, because that surrealism does not flow at all. He is here, shaping the novel in his own way, respecting the book, the original work, but naturally embodying his stamp, his personal imprint, with omissions -such as the return to civilization of the adventurers in the book, after the island at the end, missing detail in the film- and with his resrources, did everything possible. Tasty surrealistic glimpses emerge, like Robinson being rejuvenated and well-groomed in a singular reflection in the mirror, and of course, that formidable sequence, leaving the island, with the barks of Rex, where the best Buñuel returns, where without words he is able to express a whole world. It is another unusual work by Buñuel, what a versatility of the filmmaker, this is, along with a few others, and with the obvious distances from one picture to another, a film that at first impression would not be recognized as a work of its author, and precisely for that reason, it is a very interesting and seductive feature.
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