A new Buñuelian cinematographic exercise in Mexican lands, the time of his exile where he fruitfully continued to cement his career, his style and his reputation at the international field, while of course he continued to shape his indelible imprint on the films he produced. On this occasion, and like so many other times, he will again adapt a novel, now authored by Rodolfo Usigli, whose adaptation to the script did the filmmaker himself with the collaboration of Eduardo Ugarte. It is a project whose birth is affirmed had much to do with the leading actor, Ernesto Alonso, which portrays the unique story of an individual, middle-aged, without too many extraordinary things in his life, who lives convinced that he has power over human life, in the form of a musical box that he had in his childhood; the character thinks and is sure that box allows him, through the thoughts, to decide over the lives of women, and as an adult, even though trying to commit real murders, never consume them, except, according to his judgment, when the box allows him to. A film that continues to develop many of the most recurrent topics in the director's filmography, which had certain drawbacks with the author of the original work, who slowed down the realization, but nevertheless a picture of the most recognized by the filmmaker, who continued to mature artistically.
In times of convulsions of the revolution in Mexico, lives the child Archibaldo de la Cruz, conceited son of aristocrats, to whom his mother gives a musical box. That same night, Archibaldo is told a story, that box allows to liquidate the enemies, and shortly after, her governess falls down by a bullet. After remembering the event, an already adult Archibaldo (Alonso) tells everything to a nun, then tries to assassinate her, fails, but the nun falls from the top of a building and dies. Archibaldo goes to the police station, where he claims to have killed the nun, and begins to relate how, in his adulthood, he recovered the gift box from his mother, remember to meet Patricia Terrazas (Rita Macedo), recalls that he admired Carlota Cervantes (Ariadna Welter), lover of the married Alexander (Rodolfo Landa). The coquettish Patricia tries to seduce him, they are both stopped by Willy Corduran (J.M. Linares Rivas), her husband; the next day, Patricia has been murdered, the police is investigating. Archibaldo proposes marriage to Carlota, who says she will think about it, and then he meets the beautiful Lavinia (Miroslava Stern), with whom he has a brief idyll in his studio as a craftsman, and where he has a mannequin, a doll identical to her. Carlota accepts the proposal of marriage, but still sees Alexander, who kills her the very day of the wedding. Archibaldo ends up remembering, and finally leaves with his beautiful and dear Lavinia.
The satirical nature of the film is already defined from the beginning of it, with some decorum graphics in the credits that are flowing, while a sly organ music accompanies these graphics, and that warm contrast is already delineating what will be the picture. In that superb filmic beginning, pleasant and relatively new ways we appreciate, in which everything, past and present suddenly merges, thanks to that narrator voiceover, more than one temporal perspective in that way merges in that start, immediately structuring the double narrative thread that we will see, and structuring a story within the story. At the same time, a couple of Buñuelian topics rarely materialized so quickly in a film, in the initial sequences, and so efficiently, when we see an infant Archibaldo, after his governess's murder, look with wide eyes, with an expression of excitement, to the governess on the floor. His expression is representation, as the same protagonist says, of satisfaction, pleasure and morbidity, the morbone unleashed by the murder, but in turn by the naked thighs discovered of the girl -Buñuelian twinkle par excellence-, we do not know for sure if that look responds to death, the eroticism of the girl's flesh, or probably both. Rarely do we find two of the most recurrent themes of Iberian production, sex and death amalgamated so strongly, eroticism, libidine and death. Soon, others of his affiliations, his personal nuances, politics, are framed, framing everything in the violent context of the revolutionary days in Mexico, a lukewarm but always present directive that the Spanish shows in almost all his films. As stated, one of his main cornerstones, death, is a crucial point of action, because our protagonist is a murderer, a frustrated assassin, a frustrated murderer of women, with truncated deaths, but not for that the desires to kill disappear, with a bizarre irony, because finally the frustrated victims end up by effectively fading (the ardent desire frustrated, another of the Buñuelian subjects par excellence, is not lacking). Curiously and significantly, his desires to kill focus exclusively on women, fueling that aura of pusillanimous, cowardly and sterile killer, is certainly iniquitous, drinking milk instead of liquor glasses, resulting almost absurd his figure, as if something had never disappeared of the child who discovered the music box, and certainly has a childish air the correct interpretation by Ernesto Alonso.
As it could not be otherwise, the filmmaker continues to slide his winks, his personal details, his fetishes, as the well-known foot fetish, and so, shows Patricia her shoe in full betting table, and reiterated comments dedicates to it. And his warm but perceptible -for the connoisseur of the Buñuelian work- winks will continue, as Archibaldo frantically wagging his foot while making his handicrafts; or the leg of the manikin that detaches while being dragged into the boiler; and the shoe of the doll that then looms, when Carlota and her mother announce acceptance of the marriage proposal, as his guilt, as his impulse also looms. Naturally, eroticism never ceases to flow with Buñuel, with details such as Archibaldo examining the thighs of the wrist, almost pathologically, while seeking to ignite the desire of his flesh sister, Lavinia. In that same sequence, he recovers, as warmly as exquisitely, the detail of the exchange of characters, in other films shaped, Archibaldo kisses the icy mannequin's lips, thinking of Lavinia, to arouse jealousy in Lavinia, and succeeds in his work. The surreal part also collaborates with this, in the first fantasy of Archibaldo, we are shown the turgid thighs of the governess stained with blood, lust is literally fused with death, with the dark and sanguine, with the morbid, thanks to those overlayed shots, of the thighs of the girl, invaded by the blood. Religion is also present, with that prayer that Carlota recites fervently. The childhood, another of Buñuel's capital themes, one of the sources from which it drinks his inspiration, becomes present, with that character who, as was said, largely never loses something of childhood, with the symbol of the musical box, and in turn we have in it the leitmotiv with which it relapses again to the childhood of Archibaldo. He is an individual with narcissistic inclinations, "I am a man different from all the others", he cries, a subject with something of a satyr (like the filmmaker...), furtively reviewing female garments. He is defined as an "original artist who does not follow rules", certainly the protagonist has a lot of alter ego of the filmmaker himself, who prints without impudence his own features to shape his character. Archibaldo kills, and enjoys, laughs, even if it is only in fantasies, truncated desires, perhaps a repressed and curious -to call it in a way- dormant instinct of the own director. Something of his own, much in fact, has the artisan character, the potter, yes, to which Buñuel instills his own passions, complexes, obsessions.
Thus, we have a typical Buñuelian protagonist, who can be a villain, for his frustrated attempts at murder, a hero, for his ultimate goodness and desire for redemption, or an anti-hero, so indefinite comes to be the protagonist, which is almost ridiculous trying to perpetrate crimes, murder, and always fail. We are presented with a character, with his appearance and nature certainly
innocuous, undoubtedly believing that he has power over human life, that can end an existence simply with desire, but particularly, of women. Buñuel, as always, presents his character without severe moral questions, presents it as it is, almost a reflection of itself. An avid portrayer of the world around him, in this case the Mexico that welcomed him in his exile, the filmmaker loses no opportunity to delineate and criticize the aristocracy, as more than once did. And he does so of course with the resources of his art, with cinematographic resources, with those acute dialogues that are flowing, as the phrase "decent and poor is worse than rogue and rich", severe acidity to express frivolity, how shallow the aristocrats might be, who so often condemned the Aragonese's films. The portraitist Buñuel always gives time to shape Mexico, his Mexico that welcomes him, with certain folk dyes, guitars, and their people, their customs. These dialogues, which with maestro Alcoriza were always a fundamental and vital part of Talanda's genius films, this time, and without his famous collaborator scriptwriter, the dialogues, sharp and witty, diminish their power, but they do not disappear. The film in turn merges with the legend, with the myth, which once again surpasses reality, with maximum morbidity we have the manikin that is cremated, just as Miroslava's corpse would be cremated later, besides the bullfighter swords that appear also as if caressing the future fate, the torero triggering the suicide of the Czech actress; "My little Joan of Arc" calls her Archibald, and by superposition of frames, we see even the flames consuming the beautiful Miroslava, chilling and sordid premonition. The dream aspect is diminished with respect to other exercises of the Spanish, but the dreams or hallucinations are manifested more than once, the fog that looms and the music a little sly as well, and for many passages of the film photography endows the picture of an environment dark, shady, that feeds more the morbid nature of the film, the subject who thinks has power over life and death. In the end, the story ends within the film, in which one ends up wondering if all this has been only a dream in which the director's entomological wink is not missing, of course. It is an interesting film, where intimate desires, passions, fantasies, psychological aspects, where a subject wants to grow, leave behind his traumas, gets rid of the box, a triumphant music flows, and Lavinia appears in formidable end, almost inexplicably together they retire, he already widowed, perhaps he is cured, perhaps he will kill her and finally he will consume his pathology, is something that remains to be defined. Without reaching the mastery of other Mexican works of its author, like
He, we have an attractive exercise of the Aragonese, personal, powerful, good example of Buñuelian cinema.
Buñuel approaches in the present film a work not often performed by him, and not because he adapts a literary work, but because he adapts a text of international fame, wide recognition, something he had not done before, and that we would only see as a close exercise in the later Robinson Crusoe (1954). Some controversy surrounded this film, mainly by the adapted text, full and plagued by darkness, sordid characters, slaves of their passions, as the first text of the film is indicating us, beings that touch the macabre, death and sex, the powerful obsessions made this book a little less than damned for its time, the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. More than one adaptation had the novel, with different styles and approaches, but the present version remains as one of the most valuable, among the ones that best achieved and best captured the essence and spirit of its tormented protagonists. The film prints a part of everything that happened in the book, as it was known worldwide, the story of a family, of conflictive affectionate relations between one to another, a woman in love with a man of animal character, long gone, but now married to another man, and with whom she has begotten a child; when the initial individual reappears in the life of the family, great emotional storms will arise among all members of the tormented clan.
The economy and narrative effectiveness of Buñuel is soon printed in the film, when the first sequence shows the impulsive Alejandro bursting into the aristocratic residence, but more so, the stubborn character undoubtedly breaks the glass of the door, does not accept negative of the nana, his character is from the first moment, wild, uncontainable. In the same way we see his female analogue, Catalina, who without the slightest regard, professes with her words and her actions her almost animal love for him, the characters are quickly and powerfully delineated. Even on the face of her husband, she could not repress professing her love for the prodigal son, her passion is overwhelming, it is a violent, destructive passion, that can only find final consummation in that, in destruction, in death. It is pertinent to indicate that the writer of this article could not read the original work, the novel by Emily Brontë, in which, with great probability, and with the normal distances from literary to cinematographic art, it has been possible to approach with greater detail to the origins, the provenance of the nature of each character. With that in mind, we can only hear briefly how Catalina's strange feelings were born, truncated feelings, being adoptive brothers, she apparently always felt that impulsive and fervent passion for Alejandro, but being adopted, he was humiliated and despised by the aristocratic family, having her to choose marrying Eduardo, seeing the contempt of which Alejandro was prey over his miserable origins. We also have Isabel, the frail sister of Eduardo, who is moved by the suffering of the animals, in love with the fierce Alejandro, unrequited, suffering, but since not being a participant of the passion, she is not condemned. We have right there by the way Lilia Prado, who, after seeing the exercises in Illusion travels by Streetcar (1954), and her carnal interpretive imprint, her turgid physical attributes, is perceived as if she had been the ideal choice for the tormented and fiery character of Catalina, and perhaps with that image in mind, is felt almost lost in the harmless role of the innocent Isabel. Another personage to enrich this bizarre human fauna is Ricardo, the drunkard, a drunken, impotent and useless coward, also part of the sordid ancestry of that house, that reinforces the accumulation of obsessions, of pathologies, in that bizarre ecosystem where everybody is exposed to the wild impulses that dominate them.
The core of the film is the destructive and impossible romance between Alejandro and Catalina, both are renegades, soul mates that reflect each other, and this is concreted more forcefully with the phrases spelled, "our love is not of this world" it is asserted, "I love Alexander more than the salvation of my soul", she says, stern and powerful are the statements, the dialogues, which denote an overflowing passion, and everything happens in the first sequences. Even when Eduardo asked his wife if her passion would cease if he killed Alejandro, she claims that she would continue to love him after death, and so the characters and their complexities are already well-drawn. It is a destructive but seductive love, an unstoppable, irrepressible love that no other human can understand, and these dialogues help us to understand how that love can only lead to death, can only find final fulfillment and be consumed in death, as effectively ends up happening. We are faced with a variety of amour fou, crazy love, a subject that always seduced Buñuel, and the surrealists in general, the love that for one reason or another is truncated, that does not come to happen, to consummate, or in any case is a love that is not consumed as a normal love, which does not have a maximum realization as normal lovers have; there is now a dark solace, it is indeed an enjoyment that will only reach its peak with the extinction, with the death, self-destructive feeling that will consume its unfortunate members, who, as the initial label immediately indicates, are not free individuals, nor are they independent, but they are slaves of their passions, those passions are the ones that move them, manipulate them. And Alejandro is not far behind in the strength of his phrases, when he talks about Isabel, he says "if she did that (biting him), I would tear her teeth one by one", also heard "chase me, drive me crazy, show up", another insane dialogue, the efficiency in the dialogues is something that always characterized the genius of Talanda's films, although in this case did not collaborate with his greatest pillar in that section, the great Luis Alcoriza. Eduardo completes the protagonists, Ernesto Alonso feels close to his other collaboration with Buñuel, the two years later The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), with his characterization fragile and impotent, bordering on cowardice, and curiously shown from the first frames as a entomologist, we see how Buñuel is once again pouring himself immediately into his characters.
