Luis Buñuel. You know. Spanish director. He did Un Chien Andalou, with the eyeball slicing and the meat dragging. Belle du Jour, with all the kinky French sex. Not so keen on God and churches. Dalí’s number one homeboy. That Luis Buñuel.
Mr Bongo Films are releasing two of his lesser-known films, remastered for DVD, presented in shadow-tastic black and white. There’s no DVD extras; the scene selection set-up leaves a lot to be desired… but it gives us more space to talk about the films…
Susana: The Devil and the Flesh, 1951.
Starring Rosita Quintana, Fernando Soler, Víctor Manuel Mendoza and Matilde Palou.
Thunder rolls. Lightning flashes across the sky. Inside a reformatory for wayward girls, Susana (Rosita Quintana) is led to a dark, stone-walled cell, kicking and screaming and flailing at the swarthy ladies in white carrying her. It could almost be Doctor Frankenstein’s castle, for all its gothic trappings. Susana’s guttural, animalistic cries are ignored. She’s left alone with bats, rats and spiders scurrying about her cell. They’re more than a little rubbery-looking, but somehow this suits her melodramatic tendencies.
The rest of Susana takes place on a quiet, peaceful Mexican plantation, overseen by the nicest, cleanest Christian family this side of a cereal box. Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), owner of the plantation, is firm and fatherly to all his workers. His wife Carmen (Matilde Palou) treats the domestic staff with kindness and humour. Their son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) is a hard-working scholar with a tidy moustache and a catalogued library of his very own.
Buñuel, a lifelong atheist, paints such a sickeningly sweet family portrait that you almost feel they deserve to have the viperish Susana dumped on them. They’re loving and caring and God-fearing – though perhaps not as God-fearing as Felisa, the elderly housemaid who stops just short of carrying around a crucifix on her back.
Felisa (María Gentil Arcos), possibly the best character of all, takes an instant dislike to Susana, and we don’t really blame her. Even if it’s for daft, superstitious reasons, we’re behind crotchety Felisa all the way. After all, the girl is a vindictive home-breaker, a compulsive liar and more than a little slutty. After a long close up on Susana’s ample bosom, Felisa remarks with characteristic wit: “that one wouldn’t look decent in a nun’s habit.”
It’s mostly through Felisa that Buñuel keeps the Old Testament blood-and-thunder rhetoric bubbling away at the surface of Susana. Toying with melodrama and love pentagons, Buñuel has enormous fun undermining the contradiction and confusion of the bible’s “turn the other cheek” and “an eye for an eye” messages.
The whole film might play like Mexican EastEnders if it weren’t for the religion-baiting; it all becomes strangely compelling when even the slightest glance across a dinner table is painted as original sin. Buñuel himself puts it best: “Sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. Sin gives more chances to desire.”
We’re used to ‘50s dramas being trite, hammed up affairs, drenched in cheesy sentiment and rounded off with Sunday school platitudes. Don’t mistake Susana for its contemporaries; this is a sharp, witty film that knows exactly what it’s doing, and where it’s putting its hands.
The Brute, 1953.
Starring Pedro Armendáriz, Katy Jurado and Rosa Arenas.
Easing off on the religion, but not on the sexy sex, The Brute is a tragedy of childish naïvety in a town of instinctive cruelty. Pedro Armendáriz leads an impassioned cast, bringing tenderness and mindless brutality in equal measure as El Bruto (Pedro to his friends), a mountain of a man who doesn’t even realise his own strength.
If Armendáriz’s face rings a few bells, it’s likely you know him better as Kerim Bey, James Bond’s scene-stealing mentor in From Russia With Love. Pedro is no ladykiller spymaster, but his presence is no less magnetic for it. He struts and stalks and strides; a child in a man’s body, living in a dream world where everything is simple and easily explained.
Buñuel makes sure the viewer never falls into taking sides; every scene throws a different light on a character we thought we’d sussed out from first impression. Even the catty Paloma (Katy Jurado), malicious and bored, earns our sympathy from time to time, trapped as she is in a loveless marriage to a self-centred Napoleon of a landlord.
In a way, Pedro’s story is like that of Rocky, turned upside down. Neither man is blessed with much of a brain, so they’re forced to use their fists to earn their crust. Sadly, while Rocky gets his big chance and earns real love the right way, Pedro misses all his chances. He takes too long to develop a conscience, lusting after the wrong woman and finding the right woman too late.
It’s easy to blame a lot of Pedro’s mistakes on his upbringing, closely supervised by the ruthless Don Andrés (Andrés Soler). After all, this is the landlord evicting tenants so he can sell it to property developers for a hefty sum. This is the husband with a trophy wife; the son who treats his bedridden father like a naughty child. Most importantly, this is the man who brought up Pedro to believe that might is right; that his word is law, and his law is beyond reproach. Wasn’t it Philip Larkin who wrote “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”?
We might blame Don Andrés for all that, but in finding sweet, innocent Meche (Rosa Arenas), Pedro learns he has a will of his own. Meche sees beyond his coarse manners and violent instincts; perhaps the first person he has ever met who can. Everything he does and everyone he hurts from then on is his own doing; and it’s all the more heartbreaking watching him try to escape from it.
Simon Moore is a budding screenwriter, passionate about films both current and classic. He has a strong comedy leaning with an inexplicable affection for 80s montages and movies that you can’t quite work out on the first viewing.
Movie Review Archive
Originally published March 7, 2011. Updated April 10, 2018.
