By Jeremy Carr.
This story of hidden obsessions and malicious passions, climaxing in a scene of wild delirium, is like a bipolar soap opera and tragicomedy rolled into one subtly piercing satire of masculinity, authority, and persecution.”
A Good Friday mass is underway. Somber music plays while altar boys have their feet washed as part of the annual Christian custom. Observing the ceremony is one man whose attention is soon diverted from the feet of the children to the feet of the parishioners. His fetishistic gaze settles on one pair in particular. The camera pans up from accompanying bare legs to reveal a beautiful woman. The man is smitten. He approaches her after the service and she rebuffs his advance. Not a word has been spoken, but this is how it begins for Francisco (Arturo de Córdova), the leering gentleman, Gloria (Delia Garcés), the object of his attraction, and Luis Buñuel, who directed Él, a 1953 Mexican black comedy that more than lives up to the title bestowed on its American release: “This Strange Passion.”
Charting the irregular relationship between Francisco and Gloria, following this opening encounter and another thwarted pick up in the church pews, Él was written by Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza, based on a semi-autobiographical text by Mercedes Pinto with a fair helping of Buñuel’s own life thrown in, including nods to his brother-in-law’s peculiar behavior and his own latent fixations. “It may be the film I put the most of myself into,” Buñuel stated. “There is something of me in the protagonist.” And this protagonist is nothing if not persistent. Despite discovering Gloria is engaged to his friend, Raul (Luis Beristáin), Francisco is relentless in his pursuit. It pays off, though, and as Gloria later relates to the spurned Raul after meeting him on the street, she and Francisco were eventually married. But the whirlwind romance hasn’t been easy. In fact, it’s been quite difficult. And quite abnormal.
In flashback, Gloria begins a painful recollection of how Francisco’s suspicions began on the night of their wedding, when he is instantly, irrationally jealous of her prior involvement with Raul (and perhaps others). It only gets worse from there. Every new man who enters their life, even in passing, sparks a fury of resentment and distrust. Francisco obsesses over her past, present, and future, bombarding her with baseless accusations fueled by agitated imaginings that escalate into extreme possessiveness, doubt, and violence.
None of this, of course, is known to outsiders, including Gloria’s mother, the local priest, or Francisco’s associates. They come to his defense—contending he is “so normal and level-headed”—while somehow finding her at fault. Although Él is at times a very serious and disturbing film, this is where Buñuel levels his wry skepticism of class configurations and the supposedly infallible judgements of the powers that be. Francisco presents himself as beyond reproach, a wealthy, pious, and respectable figure to those who only see the façade or hear only his side of the story. Behind closed doors, where Buñuel knows the truth always reveals itself, he is anything but. The preliminary establishment of Francisco as an upright individual is key, for the higher up he appears, the further he can fall and debase himself. His amorous anguish is not unlike that of Fernando Rey in Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961) or That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), but here, Francisco, the disconcerted, middle-aged virgin, brings the suffering entirely upon himself. “To me,” Buñuel stated, Francisco “seems to be someone who is trying to free himself without knowing how.” He likens Él’s troubled lead to Archibaldo in his 1955 film, The Criminal Life Of Archibaldo De La Cruz: “Both try to escape though the imagination.” But even when he’s the architect of Gloria’s behavior—asking her to appease a young lawyer working on his case, for example—Francisco contorts the alleged offense to suit an inevitably provocative design.
As is often the case with Buñuel, audience identification is therefore never easy, and Arturo de Córdova and Delia Garcés perfectly express the whiplash of responses caused by his mania, rage, and susceptibility, and by her fear, retreat, and resolution.”
This constant oscillation between cruelty and vulnerability, wrath and repentance, lends Él a rollercoaster of emotional associations. It can be rather funny, particularly the random absurdity of Francisco’s mood swings, but it can also be dangerous and distressing. One obviously feels for Gloria, constantly subject to his eccentricities, but that sympathy is tested by her apparently masochistic desire to stick it out. “I know he loves me in some strange way,” she asserts. “But I’m afraid of him.” At the same time, Francisco is clearly in the wrong; he is abusive and relentlessly cruel. Yet he is also enduring a debilitating mental illness. With Francisco being the victim of his own puritanical inhibitions, Él is, for Buñuel, “the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made.” Francisco argues his case by declaring (with considerable understatement), “I have a highly singular view of love.” As is often the case with Buñuel, audience identification is therefore never easy, and Arturo de Córdova and Delia Garcés perfectly express the whiplash of responses caused by his mania, rage, and susceptibility, and by her fear, retreat, and resolution.
This initiates an instant and potent tension throughout the film. Again like much of Buñuel’s best work (and this is a strong contender for the best of his Mexican period), Él is never settled in its narrative progression. Francisco concocts some truly devious means to control Gloria, including a shocking measure toward the end of the film, but there’s such a bumbling quality to his efforts (akin to the Fernando Rey characters noted above) that one doubts the success of their ultimate execution. Nevertheless, there is no firm sense of what might possibly happen next as the film hovers between an overheated melodrama and a paranoid thriller; the stark cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa, who also worked with Buñuel on such superb pictures as Los olvidados (1950), Nazarin (1959), and The Exterminating Angel (1962), gives the film a noirish sense of distraught foreboding and inescapable menace. And yet, because this is Buñuel in top form, it can also be quite humorous, if only in that distinctly Buñuelian fashion.
Not everyone was laughing when Él was released, however, at least not in the ways they were supposed to. Nor were they especially impressed. It was generally seen as a letdown after Los olvidados, a triumph still fresh in the minds of critics even though Buñuel had directed five other films since then, and it was commercial disappointment. Buñuel complained about the three-week production schedule and stated a desire to one day remake the picture properly. No less than Jean Cocteau derided the film before, according to Buñuel, later changing his mind. (A positive for Buñuel was that Jacques Lacan used the movie in his class as a model example of paranoia.) Such divisiveness is not surprising, for Él is a hard film to pin down. This story of hidden obsessions and malicious passions, climaxing in a scene of wild delirium, is like a bipolar soap opera and tragicomedy rolled into one subtly piercing satire of masculinity, authority, and persecution. But in its own perverse way, it is also a quintessentially Buñuelian statement on love, forgiveness, and the potential for deliverance.
A new 4K restoration of Luis Buñuel’s Él is now playing at New York’s Film Forum.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor. He is the author of Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and Kubrick and Control from Liverpool University Press a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Something Wicked: Witchcraft in Movies, Television, and Popular Culture, from Bloomsbury Academic.