By the sixties, Buñuel had begun his last stage as a filmmaker, and this can be asserted from different perspectives. But let's go in parts. After finally, after decades of exile, having returned the director to Europe with The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), having necessarily returned to Mexico to shoot Simon of the Desert (1965), finally Buñuel takes a giant step towards what can be called his definitive cinematographic form, aesthetically, narratively, symbolically, among other ways of asserting this. The spanish, in one of his best films, and with the greatest commercial reception, adapts a novel by Joseph Kessel, which narrates the unique story of a woman, aristocratic woman, married to a prominent individual, seems to have a perfect life, surrounded of luxuries and amenities; but she, due to a series of traumas and obsessions, can not approach her husband sexually. In return, she frees her sexuality by attending clandestinely, in the afternoons, to a brothel, practicing prostitution. She will thus initiate a double life, which will set her free, but at a high price. In a film in which the severe surrealism that never disappeared in spanish began to appear, but reaching the final and sophisticated form of Buñuel's cinema, as he always did, he coherently uses his usual audiovisual resources, already touching his moment of greatest brilliance.
In a road, a couple of aristocrats travels in tílburi, and then after showing she her disdain, he causes his two servants in the car to flagellate her in the middle of the forest; but everything is a fantasy, she is Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), lives with her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel); one day she meets a unique friend of Pierre, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli). A woman tells Séverine how a mutual friend is engaged in prostitution, leaving her very restless; she meets Husson again, he gives her the address of a local brothel, and she goes, meets Madame Anais (Geneviève Page), who manages the place. She hesitates at the beginning, but begins to work as a prostitute, works in the afternoons, while her husband works, that is why she is baptized as Bella by day, attends a businessman, a prominent gynecologist, a rude Asian man who violents her, and she enjoys it. She then meets a strange duke (Georges Marchal), who participates in a complex necrophilous representation; she continues to maintain her double life, and improves her relations with Pierre. She meets another client, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), on another occasion, both of them are attracted, but her wedding anniversary trip awakens in him a lot of jealousy. One day, to the brothel goes Husson, they recognize each other, while a jealous Marcel arrives at Séverine's house, and shoots Pierre, leaves him in a coma. But apparently everything was another fantasy.
The film is, from its exquisitely surrealist approach, Séverine's journey of liberation, of exploration, of her most intimate impulses, and the first image we will see will be of great symbolism, orange trees, autumnal trees with their dark orange leaves opening the movie. Well framed is that first image, and also that sequence, symmetrical, while cinegetic sound flows. The only thing we hear, as in a daydream, are the bells, the sound and the characters are slowly entering the scene, slowly grow in size and intensity, a short introduction to what we will see. It is one of the best opening sequences of Buñuel's filmography, not with too much margin of error could be asserted that it is even the best of them all, in the sense that it is an extraordinary exordium, an exemplary proem of what we will see, a sample of that unreal fantasy -or maybe not so unreal-, of what happens, of the unknown that will float on whether it is all reality or fantasy, and where the inside of her head is clearly diagrammed, the palpitating sexual obsessions of hers that are the heart of the film, fantasy afterwards which she lies, almost lifeless. Great beginning, that connects perfectly with the end, union without seams, nerver-seen the forcefulness of the film in that sense. She first has an intense sexual fantasy, and then avoids sex with her husband, we are already drawn to the complex this-time female character, the contradiction is already served; then fantasize at levels more sadistic, more humiliating, but for her satisfactory, as her facet of prostitute evolves. His double life is a severe contradiction, avoiding sex with the husband, satisfying herself in masochistic prostitution, a contradiction that is added to that of reality opposed to unreality, dissimilar binomials that are one of the recurrent guidelines of the surreal manifesto. The more submerged she is in her world of prostitution, the further away from her husband, she feels paradoxically closer to him, she meditates; the carriages, the elegant dinners, the tennis games, all that comfort is the opposite of what she wants. There is a renewed variety in the resources of the director's narrative, in the ways that Buñuel uses to get out of linearity in his narration, the way, to a certain extent sudden and violent, in which those ruptures or changes take place, the passage, from what with very faint certainty can be called reality, to fantasy, memory, or trauma. These characteristics turn the film into a certain indecipherable way, impossible to discern with complete certainty - as if this with Buñuel was something new...-, if something is real or unreal, being exemplary of this transitive violence from one world to another the sequence of the girl, the suspicious child rape that has turned Séverine into what she is, a complex woman who can not manifest her pleasure and carnal enjoyment in a normal way, that is, towards the man she loves, her two worlds, love and flesh, husband and her office, are incompatible.
And those violent irruptions, apart from sudden, separate both worlds without being conventionally indicated -like a classic flashback-, in that violent course, the limit of the real to the oneiric vanishes, from the present to a probable past, to the memory, is diluted. Without falling into the delirium of his beginnings of crude and pure surrealism, now the director is an artist who shows his particular maturity, and not to lose the habit, among those many irruptions, religion looms, and even Séverine looks at the camera, to us through her sunglasses, in the respective sequence. This is a new way of structuring his cinematic story, the director polishes his surrealism, since this, the dissolution of boundaries between onirism and reality, between one time and another, is characteristic of surrealism, and elements like ticking clocks will be added, bells, sleighbells, those sounds foreign to the diegetic are the threads, the vehicles through which events are articulated. Thus, the oneiric resources are at the filmmaker's complete disposition, it is the full freedom that achieves when there is no tangible dividing line between reality and dreams; for example, the singular duel between husband and friend occurs when her world of double life finally breaks down, duel from which symbolically -or maybe not-, Pierre is victorious, while the irony of the husband's friend is served, with him the demented journey begins, and Séverine's odyssey ends with him as well. Other elements characteristic of the dream flow, the constant insinuation to the cats, in their first fantasy and then with the necrophilic duke; then Pierre looks at an abandoned wheelchair on a street, a raw premonition. As it was said at the beginning of the previous paragraph, she in the film discovers her sexuality, matures, even with her husband she finally seems to find balance and well-being in their relationship, although, obviously, she never copulates with him; she is a singular character who finds virtue in vice and excess, the morally acceptable disappears, Buñuel's classic study, the human of extreme characteristics, or subjected to extreme circumstances. Then, when she matures, we see the trees again, green now, they have become green, like her, she has gone from the autumn that represented living with her husband, to the flourishing spring of her clandestine life as a prostitute, where all her demons and sexual obsessions have free rein, symbolic chromatic ecstasy. To the force of these sequences, of those frames, collaborate, and much, aesthetically, the vigorously clean images of Sacha Vierny, master who worked with Resnais, Greenaway, among others, who said the director was responsible for his reconciliation with color; visually, after Husson says the whole truth to Pierre, we see overlayed images of trees and buildings, they are the most delirious, he has been crippled, expressive license in precise and significant moment. It is noticed that the director has reached his full maturity, and of course, he does it while he slides to us a new study, a new approach to the bourgeois world, never so violently stripped and violated its principles, its constrainings, limiting conventions that generate this liberator journey in Séverine. A trip necessary for her, she discovers that this, the world of the brothel, is her true world, is her true nature, and her curse, "I will pay for what I do, but I can not live without this," she affirms, a masochist, sadistic, who finds satisfaction and pleasure in being ordered, in being dominated, first sketches a smile when Anais orders her to enter with her first client, and her response to the Asian man's violence confirms what happens to her, her liberated metamorphosis. 
As in many other Buñuelian characters, there is no express Manichaeism, she is not morally condemnable, she achieves her liberation from the ties of conventional society, from reality, it is like freeing oneself from the donkeys that pull the character of An Andalusian Dog (1929), always playing with religion. "How can you fall so low?", asks her after seeing the gynecologist's aberration, without noticing that she is now surrounded by them, sordid prostitutes, she is one of them now, of that place and its human fauna, moreover, the elegant aristocrat is much more successful than any other prostitute, relegates them. Something fascinating happens in the film, one of the topics, one of his usual themes in his characters, is the theme of the wish not fulfilled in them, the desire always frustrated -like the amour fou, the crazy love of The Golden Age (1930), and so many others-, is broken, finally it is with her the desire consummated, and in a brutally violent, sexually challenging way, a singularly unique Buñuel character, it is not surprising that she is a woman. Of course, his everlasting foot fetish will not be absent, we will see the feet of his female protagonist Deneuve, while she climbs with her distinguished shoes the whorehouse, then a curious variety with her feet, and Marcel's foot on top, with sock leaky. Another element flows, and when flowing, as in another article I mentioned, it's like talking to a good comrade, conversation in which you recognize the winks, tics and characteristics of your fellow, now we see it with the stick that moves oil, tar, as The Golden Age, and the everlasting box, of An Andalusian Dog, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1954), among others, and that the women especially asked what was in it, not knowing the filmmaker himself what it was. Technically, his camera behaves with the usual sobriety of that stage of the filmmaker, unfolds with tranquility, something more leisurely than in other occasions, but it walks through situations with elegance, builds sequence shots, briefs, but he does, follow-ups of the characters, the master is already proficient in that aspect, there is even a overhead frame, his versatility with the camera is manifested. It seems so inspired the filmmaker who even dares to do something that almost never happened in his filmography, is encouraged to appear as an actor, although very succinctly, in some segment of the film, as a guest when she meets a client, and then as a passer-by, interesting that the director uses a very improper resource in him. Add a new element to his repertoire of recidivist figures, the characters that hide under the table as we would see in The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and work with European actors whose elegance he missed and wished in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Muni already begins to be his usual, actress who according to the director became something like his pet; in the acting section, the director had also arrived at twilight. The ending is perfect for the film, Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated on the script, worked a lot in this ending, without words, almost never was it, never his images expressed so much without a single monosyllable, frustration, anger, humiliation, the tear begins to roll when he knows the truth, she tries to act normal, impossible, and when we reach the climax, everything may have been a fantasy, everything may have never happened -or not, we just don't know for sure-, ending as prodigious as the beginning, leaving the full-length film as a capicúa number, now there are no leaves on the trees, now the winter has arrived. It is his biggest commercial success, attributed that the filmmaker more to the whores than to his good work as a filmmaker, very typical assertion and consideration of the genius, with the theme of love, a prostitute with a thug, bizarre love, love with a prostitute, theme of effective impact, a situation that not a few filmmakers portrayed. The religious references are not lacking, a character asserts that a bar is never boring, unlike a church "where you are alone with your soul", and the scene of the necrophiliac duke, which was lamentably mutilated by the censorship, Buñuel saying that mentioned sequence lost a lot of its strength. This is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of Luis Buñuel, it was undeniable, the moment of maturity began, the Mexican stage was completely behind, and the highest peaks of Buñuel's cinematographic art would finally see the light.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario