The Brute (1953) - Luis Buñuel

Buñuel would continue his prolific stage in Mexican lands with this film, a film in which he also continues to make clear the experience he achieved, the shooting and dominion he had already acquired after a few years shooting on Aztec soil. The filmmaker returns to work with his scriptwriter Luis Alcoriza, to bring to the big screen a story in which himself collaborated in the script, a crude story, full of pathos, and with which Buñuel returns to his most recognizable and recurring cinematographic topics, that for a moment had left aside in his previous film, A woman without love (1952). Buñuel did not exactly have the best impression of this work of his, as often happened with his Mexican films, lamented some changes that were imposed to him regarding his original desires, but nevertheless he ends up configuring a very well achieved film, concise, that may well not be among his loftiest creations, but it is an exercise worthy of attention. It is the story of Bruto, a hard worker, very strong subject to whom his employer orders to intimidate the tenants of the neighborhood he owns, he wants to evict them, and they resist; the Brutus does it well, but when he discovers love in a young girl, one of the tenants, everything gets complicated, especially when he becomes entangled with the boss's wife. Interesting film by the Spanish director, containing a lot to keep in mind.

                

The action unfolds in a neighborhood, with humble dwellings, in one of them lives Meche (Rosa Arenas) with his father, Carmelo González (Roberto Meyer), who one day are alarmed by a scandal in the neighborhood, the owner of the site: Andrés Cabrera (Andrés Soler), wants to sell the property, demands everybody to leave from there, generating conflict. To silence the tenants, Andrés’s wife, Paloma (Katy Jurado), gives the idea of ​​looking for a thug guy to intimidate them. The one seeked is Pedro, nicknamed El Bruto (Pedro Armendariz), for his great physical strength, his workman to whom he orders to frighten the tenants, especially Carmelo, who leads the neighbors. The Brutus sets in motion, and strikes the old man, with such bad luck that Carmelo ends up dying. The neighbors, alerted, try to kill the aggressor, but he escapes, and knows Meche, who helps him, ignoring he is the murderer of his father. The Brutus also soon becomes entangled with Paloma, intense adultery is consumed, which complicates everything when the woman learns of the romance of the Brute with Meche, telling her without a doubt that he is to blame for the death of her father. Paloma also lies to Andrés, accusing the Brute of abusing her, demanding that he liquidates his workman, but in facing him, finally the worker ends up killing him. In the end, the Brute has managed to keep Meche's neighbors from being evicted, but will have a tragic ending.

Buñuel already shows the experience he has acquired in Mexico with his filming, a filmmaker who proved his versatility, his economy, and his rigor, and we can appreciate the characteristic Buñuelian kick-off, the camera showing a close-up of a detail, then will get back and show us the larger image; in this case, is first seen the frame of Meche with the dropper giving medicines to his sick father, and then his humble dwelling in the neighborhood owned by Andrés. Subsequently, as the best filmmakers always do, that is, narrating without words, presents us with one of the keys of the film, Paloma, who looks at herself in the mirror, who eats some grapes, sensually chews them while watching her reflection, shows the teeth, as the beast that will prove to be; in a few moments we already know that she is a carnal woman, and without pronouncing a single monosyllable. In a similar way, the Brute is symbolically presented, he works in a slaughterhouse, a slaughterhouse, according to the brutality of his personality, carrying huge meats, animal corpses open in half, thus delineating the character well, as was done with Paloma, although the initial case was more exemplary. The deployment of the camera also shows us the maturity in the office, the profession of director Buñuel has achieved, a mobility of the camera that makes his film very cinematic, with subtle travellings, approaches and departures that change us more than once the perspective, and separate it from other filmic exercises that may have had a flatter treatment, close to the theater, as, without going any further, it is the case of the immediately preceding picture, the cited A woman without love. Technically, then, it is a work well done, both for the handling of the camera and its ease, but also for the beautiful photography, with those powerful dark shots that will be repeated, a sober photograph that always beautifies a film. And it is no accident that, the gloomy locations, dark images that always flow with the Brute as protagonist, which complement each other, as externalizing the personality of the iron subject, these obscure images will keep flowing, very noticeably photographed. Always he in the dark, always the Brute moving around in a shady environment, either at his initial home, or at the locations that Andres gives him, the darkness always follows him, but let's not confuse, because here it borns another factor that makes this feature so remarkable and appreciated for some critics.

And it is that our protagonist evolves, his character, El Bruto, becomes complex, and so on the picture, which erroneously would be cataloged as a drama like so many others, we find it difficult to judge him, to declare him a villainous, to see him despicable and condemnable. We empathize with the supposed villain, who falls in love, who dresses well, who humanizes to us when learning that his hard heart harbors warm, tender feelings, wants to change for her, wants to leave that world which ends up devouring him; the rigidity of what would be a melodrama in all its senses is broken, we have a complex character in the Brute of great strength but of little intelligence, that contrast makes the character attractive, and seeing him in the end approaching the fragile Meche, after having liquidated two people, knowing that he is responsible for the death of her father, is almost ridiculous, but tender, he says I will return for you, because I love you very much, a desperate situation that touches pathetism. In that sense, the feature is undeniably a dramatic film, it is a drama, however much Buñuel regrets the final result and asserts that was not his intention at the beginning of the shooting, and probably the imposed changes to which the filmmaker referenced had something to do with that final product. The film, by the way, was born from an idea of ​​Alcoriza, with the nucleus of the story, the tenants who face the landlord, in turn intimidated by a very rough guy; one of the contributions of the filmmaker, who was initially not in the plans, is the element of the owner's father, Andrés, an old man, that some follies originates, constantly repeating "puñales" (something like “damn”). Another recognizable Buñuelian detail is the treatment of love sequences, always an enemy to show kisses the filmmaker, now, as well as at Great Casino (1948), it was Jorge Negrete moving the stick in oil, we see the meat that is cooked, burned, consuming, obvious and very powerful and eloquent wink to the carnal idyll that in turn is cooking. Katy tells Brutus to leave the meat, let the flesh burn... As it was said, in this film Buñuel returns to several of his whole-life- topics, beginning of course by the sexual subject, the flesh, the lust, in the figure obviously of Paloma, carnal woman, intense, fiery and fearsome like a beast, we will see again the games of glances, glances full of libidine.

Also the figure of exchange of person returns, Paloma, first indifferent in the bed before the kisses of her husband, after meeting the Brute, begins already to burn of desire, and although it is Andrés who kisses her, she has the Brute in her head, as it happened in Ascent to Heaven (1952), and Susana (1950), a figure practiced by the surrealists, part of the amical and intellectual circle of the Aragonese; now, the concept is the same, but without the exchange of faces, a warm wink to another of his known resources. There could not be shortage of the animal element, in the so buñuelian detail of the hen, that seems like a dense nightmare, because certainly a nightmare is over, and that final shot with Katy in front of the bird, is certainly another detail added to the Aragonese, and is formidable, again without words, wordlessly, again surreal, an excellent sequence, with no words and eloquently, almost disturbingly, she looks at it strangely; Buñuel considered the hens as nightmarish animals, and he knew how to capture it at the right time, and in the most effective way. The notorious and famous Katy Jurado arises, a woman of iron temperament, fierce and fearsome, legendary actress of character, is already leaving her imprint Jurado (chilling to hear her screaming, "kill him”, "kill him”, unmindful, intense and ruthless, once her lover fleed away, the possessive beast only wants to destroy him), a personality of Mexican cinema, who has always shown his strong humanity, beautiful, young and glowing, perfect for the role of the carnal Paloma. Pedro Armendariz, another personality of Mexican cinema, also plays a memorable role in the gross and in love worker, Buñuel had the right guess and seductive power to have worked with referential actors in Mexico, and always, with some exception, managed to direct them well. Buñuel recovered for this film his topic of unfortunate people, very related to The young and the damned (1947), even for the name of the innocent, Meche, in addition to focusing on unfortunate people, with pathetic dramas, plagued by misery, violence, death, people trapped in their circumstances, circumstances that devour them, a hell from which there is no escape, which consumes their desperate tenants. Someone wanted to see in the film a political milestone within the cinematography of the author, because he had never before exposed so directly the clash of classes, patrons against workers in the figure of the landlord and his tenants, while on the other hand there is the severe feminine counterpoint, severe contrast, the pure and chaste Meche, against the carnal, the dominant Paloma, pure carnality, demonic, ruthless, cutting the stems of flowers, disposing of lives. A history of pathos and misery, extreme situations, a solid drama, which although not completely convinced its author, will be very appreciable for Buñuel's admirers.

Daughter of Deceit (1951) - Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel continued developing his Mexican cinematographic facet, the moment of his career after that irrepressible surreal irruption of his beginnings, to generate what many brand as minor works, works that were made to subsist as, even, did the filmmaker with the feature that we are now dealing with. The film is based on a successful play by Carlos Arniches, adapted by the well-known pair of screenwriting fellows,b husband and wife, Luis and Janet Alcoriza, which in turn is based on a previously existing Spanish movie, in which Buñuel also got involved. With the natural transitions and adaptations of a typically Spanish work to Mexican lands and customs, we are introduced to the story of Don Quintin Guzman, a conservative man, who suddenly discovers that his wife deceives him, catches her in adultery, and she, in disgust, tells him that the newly-born daughter of both is actually the product of that adultery; the deceived subject believes her, and gives the baby to some neighbors, but years later, he will learn the truth about the girl, provoking unexpected situations. Almost consensually considered as a minor work, even being almost forgotten by its author, the picture certainly is not among the best of the Aragonese filmmaker, but will serve as much for those who want to study the work of the referential director, in his stage in Aztec lands.

            

In a humble home, appears Quintín Guzmán (Fernando Soler), with his wife, who disowns and scolds him for the desperate lack of money in the house. Quintín, aided by a friend, goes on a journey to earn good money, but the train where he was about to travel suffers a setback, the man returns almost immediately to his home, finding his wife, cheating on him with that friend. Quintín throws the woman out of the house, and she, in a moment, shouts to him that the baby is not actually his daughter, and seeing this, the tormented individual ends up leaving the baby in a neighboring house. Quintín continues his life alone, surrounded only by his bodyguards, Angelito (Fernando Soto) and El Jonrón (Nacho Contla), ignoring the mother's pleas to return the child. Time passes, the girl becomes a woman, her name is Martha (Amparo Garrido), who one day knows the young Paco (Ruben Rojo), among them flows quickly an idyll. Martha lives with Lencho (Roberto Meyer), and his daughter, his adoptive sister Jovita (Alicia Caro); before dying, the biological mother of Martha confesses to Quintín that the girl was indeed her daughter. The man starts searching, and manages to find the house where Jovita lives; initially difficult, finally finds the girl. While Jovita has some success like cabaret singer, and in spite of initial differences of Quintín with Paco, father and daughter, and son-in-law, forget differences and wait for the happy birth of the first-born.

We can nottice a characteristic Buñuelian starting of the picture, when the camera focuses the detail of a light bulb, the same one that soon gets broken, and the camera recedes to show the complete figure, the precarious home of the Guzmán spouses; in this simple figure, the good Aragonese is already slipping the reality of the home, misery, precariousness, light bulb gets burned, the needs press them, the filmmaker always displayed signs of economy and narrative eloquence. From the first moments, we will also see a curious performance of the camera in the beginning of the movie, we can see a singular development of the lens, there are zooms in and zooms out, which add to certain travellings that generate a peculiar and attractive dynamic, which unfortunately dissipates and gets lost promptly. These ephemeral and striking displays of looseness in the camera, are surprisingly the only sample of something different, something different from conventional visual narration, and the minutes go by, we will not appreciate other moments that break that usually conventional tone that permeates the whole feature. In dribs and drabs that singular behavior of the camera will rteturn, a certain trembling, tremulous effect, which in certain moments resurges to engender comedy, or tense moments; but what I said, appears with eyedropper. To return to that point, in a picture in which it is known that the budget is not something that was abundant, Buñuel was forced to appeal to his narrative economy, when in little more than ten minutes the crux of the drama is already raised; without more ornaments -because the financial resources did not allow it-, already established the first part of his conventional narrative structure, the introduction, the drama that the Guzman are experiencing. Thus, within the linear structure of the feature, within its narrative and audiovisual linearity, the most remarkable narrative resource, with distance, comes to be that ellipsis, that great temporal leap that is applied automatically when Martha's adoptive drunk father closes the doors of his cupboard. While the screams and the cries flows, instantly afterwards, when the cupboard is opened, the decades went by, the just-a-moment-ago baby girl instantly is now a young woman of twenty years, the adoptive mother has already died, the adoptive father has aged, and the booze worsen his situation. Within a flat and linear narrative structure, being this one of the director's most conventional pictures, this resource, without being too flashy or extraordinary, is the most technically salient element.

The work is characterized by transparently portraying the town, the charros, the popular customs of the lower class to which the protagonists belong, considering of course that the play, originally Spanish, has been adapted to the Mexican canons. And so, among other figures, in the character of Jonrón we have the typical Mexican macho, somewhat caricatured version, as much of the film. Important figure within the Mexican scope, the stereotype of the virile charro, who wants to solve practically everything with bullets raids. All the Spanish customs have to migrate to Mexico, the famous Alcoriza spouses in this way, change Spanish soil by the Mexican moor in their history (and in their real life also, actually), with all the characteristic and representative figures of Aztec lands. And to a certain extent this is a film that can be considered a remake, in days when the term was still not coined at all, is a feature in which in many sequences the dialogues were simply mexicanized to move the story from one context to another. In that course, in this Mexicanization, Buñuel seems to have got lost, who also claims almost not remembering the production of this film, assures that "nothing came out well", and that it was a alimentary film, made with the purpose of subsisting, to obtain sustenance, situation quite common in this stage of the Iberian filmmaker. This softening of the film, added to the precariousness of the production, the budget shortage, resulted in a feature quite removed from the majority of directives of the Aragonese filmmaker, configuring a picture, although not bad or deficient, yes between the less achieved or more successful of the Spanish director. In this way, much of the film, much of the original Spanish canons, are transmuted to the conventions of Mexican cinematography, the drama is sweetened and softened with comic situations. It gets generated a unique blend of Mexican cinema with even a few doses of western, as caricatured as exemplified in the scene of the discussion of the Jonron with another subject in the bar, an excellent example of the light humor that slides on the movie, a warm mood which is correctly dosed throughout the footage of the work. That American halo will continue to be printed, we see girls, dancers, cabarets, even the young Jovita, wishing to success as a cabaret singer, surrounded by night shows, and charros that warmly remembrance the absent cowboys.

There is also the infallible figure of the drunkard, Martha's adoptive father, perennially drunk, the despicable abuser, first martyring his wife to death, then the young adoptive; always with the bottle of liquor in his hand, and always ready to hit women, is a negative element, but always present in the sketch of Mexican society, and almost in any society actually. It's Angelito, Quentin's bodyguard, from whom it comes a lot of the movie's hilarity, the picardies, the comic moments, in different circumstances will always have the funny dose that serves to finish giving that comical general shade to the film. He continues to collaborate with Fernando Soler, an illustrious Mexican actor with whom he has worked so well, they cinematographically synergized, as it gets attested in the reiterated works they performed together, as well as the repeated mutual praises of the respected artists. Soler fulfills well the role, the solvent Mexican actor demonstrates why he became a pillar of this stage of Buñuel's cinema, the actor who had a lot of director, who was said to direct himself, leaves his stamp of interpretive sufficiency, always serious and distinguished. Buñuel was upset because of the significant changes from one country to another, he denied of the change of the original title, Quintín el Amargao (something like Quintín the bitter), to the Daughter of the deceit, for interests of producers, Buñuel asserted that if the original title had been retained, the concurrence in the premiere and subsequent projections of the film would have been much greater, since the Spanish people would have attended knowing that they would appreciate a work well known and appreciated by them. All this, added to global results that did not satisfy the filmmaker, ends up configuring the poor impression that Buñuel had of this picture of his. It is curious to hear the character, Quintín complaining, "nothing comes out well", feeling almost like an echo, as an alter ego of the director, who probably felt during the shooting that many things did not actually come out, and we see the protagonist, he denies of his bitterness, in the midst of the joy of a party. At the end of the film, the filmmaker almost seems to want to shake off linearity, the behavior of the camera already takes on other outlooks, with an almost deformity of some shots shown, certainly a flashy performance, lukewarm but perennial in that street of singular structures, which, as unreasonable as it may sound, for a moment seemed to me to refer to an echo of expressionism. In that colophon sequence, the protagonist speaks to us, speaks to the camera, almost the filmmaker wants to leave the mold, it is as if, to some extent having lost the drama, when feeling simple the end, too easy, something simple, a slap almost is notticed, like if old Buñuel, the surrealist and uncontrollable, winked at us. Thus ends the so-called Buñuel's alimentary film, for some considered minor, but of course a work worthy of attention on the part of the immortal Aragonese.