Buñuel's Él A Midweek Must-See
By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 9, 2012 8:40PM
Luis Buñuel’s filmmaking career spanned six decades, and it was his time in Mexico that proved to be the Spaniard’s most prolific as a director. Buñuel released 21 films produced or co-produced in Mexico between 1946 and 1965, in the thick of The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. Buñuel’s 1950s series of “Surrealist melodramas” set the stage for his 60s oeuvre, perhaps his most prolific decade as a filmmaker.
It was in Mexico where Buñuel was able to fully explore the surrealist influences he and Salvador Dali first used in the 1929 classic silent short Un Chien Andalou; recurring themes of religion (he was an avowed atheist), love and obsession, and developed an economical shooting style where he followed scripts in order as much as possible in order to minimize editing time, and only offered his actors the simplest of direction.
One of the best films of Buñuel’s Mexican period, 1953’s Él, has risen in stature to fans and cinema buffs because of its scattershot availability over the past 20 years, but it also serves as a crash course in Buñuel 101. Our own Rob Christopher, writing for Cine-File, calls Él “a Rosetta stone of his favorite themes: Catholicism, crazy love, women's feet—all three of which he manages to combine in the very first scene.” Religiously devout businessman Don Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Cordova) falls in love with the stunning and younger Gloria (Delia Garcés), who is slow to return his advances.
What follows is a May-December romance rife with irrational jealousy as Francisco accuses Gloria of cheating on him over the years—accusations that Gloria steadfastly denies even as friends, family and even their priest refuse to believe her. Francisco is pushed towards madness by the return of Gloria’s former fiancé, Raúl (Luis Beristáin).
Jealousy has long been a simple yet effective plot device in the right hands and Buñuel guides the viewer through 90 minutes of tense terror: at one point Francisco shoots Gloria with a gun loaded with blanks in order to “teach her a lesson.”
Buñuel later wrote that Francisco, ostensibly the hero in Él, “interests me as a beetle, or a disease-carrying fly does. I’ve always found insects exciting.” The Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen Él in a 35mm print at the Portage Theater 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 10.