Él

Luis Buñuel’s made thirty-two films in three different countries in two hemispheres over the span of a career that lasted 48 years, from 1929 to 1977. Some of them are great, some of them are good, and several are simply bad. His best were his first two flagrantly surrealist films made in France, An Andalusian Dog and L’Âge d’Or, a one-off documentary that was promptly banned in his native Spain called Las Hurdes, the fearless Mexican film Los Olvidados, his triumphant return to Spain (and top form), Viridiana, the Mexican short Simon of the Desert, and his very last film in France, That Obscure Object of Desire. 

Some critics don’t seem satisfied with so much fine work to celebrate. Now that even his most obscure films are available, they hold up his lesser, flawed films, like Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, Tristana, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as masterpieces as well. They even find something to praise in films that Buñuel admitted were failures, like Él (1953), which has lately achieved a cult status. In his exquisite memoir, My Last Breath, Buñuel characterized Él (He) as a dramatized case study: 

It’s simply the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made. Afterwards, he increasingly perceives reality according to his obsession, until everything in his life revolves around it. Suppose, for instance, that a woman plays a short phrase on the piano and her paranoid husband is immediately convinced that it's a signal to her lover who's waiting somewhere outside, in the street. . . .(1) 

This is a good premise for a study of pathology, but how does a viewer who doesn’t suffer from Señor Galván de Montemayor’s fixations respond to Buñuel’s exploration of them? They are wrong, I think, to believe that Buñuel intended us to laugh – there isn’t a trace of humor in the film. To Buñuel, the man’s case is a source of interest for an outsider like him, for whom the manias resulting from the final stages of a Christian ethos, spurred by a rapacious capitalism in which property is sovereign, are a source of interest in themselves. 

The film opens with the repellent Roman Catholic ritual of foot washing in which a priest on Holy Thursday washes the feet of a subordinate (in this case an altar boy) as Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Buñuel adds to our discomfort by closing in with Gabriel Figeroa’s camera for a closeup of the priest kissing the boy’s foot. The man filling the basin with water is Francisco, who, judging from his participation in the ritual, is church laity and a pillar of society. He watches the priest kissing another’s boy’s foot, then abstractedly looks down the row of feet in the congregation until he sees the stylish shoes worn by Gloria, an attractive young woman. When she notices Francisco’s gaze, she becomes alarmed. 

The service ended, she leaves the church, but when she reaches the holy water font, Francisco is there holding a handful of water into which to dip her fingers. She turns away from him and by the time he reaches the street her car has driven away. Francisco returns to the church every day in hopes of seeing her again, and when he finally does and he tells her of his obsession, she tells him she is engaged to another man. 

Following her from the church, Francisco discovers that Gloria’s fiancé is an old friend of his named Raúl. Francisco invites the two of them to his house (an Alphonse Mucha art deco nightmare) where his gives an impassioned speech about love over dinner that conquers Gloria. Strolling together in the garden, Gloria kisses Francisco. 

The film jumps forward a little, and then jumps back as Gloria tells Raúl, whom she had thrown over to marry Francisco, what a nightmare her marriage to him became, right from their wedding night. Honeymooning in Guanajuato (an exquisite old city in the mountains), Francisco is suspicious of every man they encounter. He discovers an old acquaintance is staying right next door to their hotel room. He takes a hatpin to the adjoining door and rams it through the keyhole.

Francisco's suspicions and accusations become increasingly violent as the film proceeds to its inevitable conclusion with him becoming completely unhinged and sequestered in a monastery. It would’ve been too much to ask of Buñuel to make Francisco the least bit pathetic, when none of Buñuel’s characters inspires our sympathy. Every one of them seems at least half-crazed, and most of them are doomed. Buñuel takes a very dim view of human beings, so why should Francisco and Gloria be any different? The only benefit his characters derive from his dramas is experience – but it is of the most unedifying kind. 

The film feels terribly rushed, especially in the introductory scenes, as if Buñuel’s hurried shooting schedule had affected the narrative. It’s stock footage up until Francisco’s maniacal jealousy begins to show itself. The acting is merely competent. Arturo de Córdova was briefly in Hollywood, even playing Casanova (which is ironic in itself – Francisco’s jealousy is clearly the result of sexual inadequacy). He plays Francisco as straight as possible under the circumstances, but Buñuel’s direction must’ve been confusing. Buñuel admitted that Él was a miscalculation: 

In general, it wasn’t very well received. In Mexico, El was nothing short of disastrous. Oscar Dancigers [the film’s producer] stormed out of the screening room while the audience was convulsed with laughter. I went into the theatre just at the moment when (shades of San Sebastian) the man slides a long needle through a keyhole to blind the spy he thinks is lurking behind the door. Oscar was right; they were laughing. The film played for a couple of weeks, but only thanks to the prestige of Arturo de Cordova, who played the lead. 

I didn’t find anything funny about the film, and I have to wonder what his Mexican audience was laughing at. There is not even a trace of the sardonic or ironic. There are only increasingly strained examples of paranoia. Because Francisco is so respected by society and by the head of the local church (everyone, it seems, takes his side in confrontations), there is a political aspect to the film, but it doesn’t have the bite that it does in Viridiana or even in the flawed Nazarin. And there isn’t a flicker of the eroticism Buñuel liked to throw in at the oddest moments. 

So, if you remove the comedic aspect of the story, what's left? As Buñuel wrote, “My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinémathèque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths.” 

(1) My Last Breath (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).