Los Olvidados

In 1951, the Cannes film festival was the setting for one of the most surprising resurrections in movie memory. Luis Buñuel, who was last heard from in Europe in the mid-1930s as the director of Las Hurdes, a documentary about the poorest region in Spain, and as co-director (with Jean Gremillon) of an abortive "comedy" about the Spanish army called ¡Centinela, alerta!, reappeared with a new film made in Mexico called Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones). 

Only later would we learn about Buñuel's wilderness years in America, his working for the Museum of Modern Art in New York until a book by Salvador Dali exposed him as an atheist and he was fired, and his fruitless sojourn in Hollywood, working clandestinely on Robert Florey's The Beast With Five Fingers (1946).

In 1946, just when Buñuel thought that his filmmaking days were over and he was about to apply for American citizenship, the producer Oscar Dancigers somehow persuaded him to go to Mexico and direct movies for him. It was not, of course, anything like his avant-garde days in Paris - the films he would make in Mexico over the next twenty years were, with a few exceptions, commercial work for a mass movie market.

His first film, Gran Casino, was a musical - not exactly the most auspicious way to restart one's filmmaking career. "I hadn't been behind a camera in fifteen years," Buñuel wrote years later, "and if the scenario's not particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn't half bad."(1) The film floundered and Buñuel waited two years before Dancigers entrusted him with the star vehicle El Gran Calavera in 1949. "I agreed to do it, and although El gran calavera was impossibly banal, it made a lot of money." So Dancigers suggested to Buñuel that he make a "real" movie next. Italian neo-realism was creating all the buzz at film festivals around the world. It inspired Kurosawa to make Stray Dog, which is a kind of Japanese Bicycle Thieves, but with a stolen gun instead of a bicycle. Neo-realism also inspired Satyajit Ray to make his Apu Trilogy a few years later. Buñuel knew and admired Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, so he decided to make a film about Mexico City's slum children. De Sica's film - and neo-realism in general - had been drawn from the devastation of Rome by the war. It's social criticism was tempered by the effects of an historic disaster. There had been no war in Mexico, unless one counts the deeply-rooted class war that condemned a majority of Mexicans to poverty. 

Already in 1950, Mexico City was one if the most densely-populated cities in the world. Poor Mexicans in the regions surrounding the city who moved there in pursuit of job opportunities found themselves in overcrowded shanty towns where living conditions were hazardous at best. It was Dancigers who suggested to Buñuel that he make a film about the city's slum children. Disguised in threadbare clothes, he toured the shanty areas, noting down incidents, listening to people's stories. From these he cobbled together a script, with Luis Alcoriza, every detail of which he claimed was true to the lives he was portraying. The result was a pitilessly clear picture of the effects of poverty on the most vulnerable among us - the children.

Comparing Los Olvidados to Shoeshine would be unproductive. But De Sica had the advantage of a genius for directing child "non-actors," as he had already shown in his fascist-era film, The Children Are Watching Us. But Buñuel had an advantage as well. In his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in Encountering Directors, Samuels asked De Sica why he avoided the subject of homoeroticism among the shoeshine boys. "Because the subject revolted me," he replied. On the evidence of his films alone, Buñuel appears to be attracted to precisely the things that the rest of us find revolting. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel included a scene in which Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) is propositioned for sex by an older man in the street outside a shop. (The scene is shot through the shop window, so we can't hear the dialogue, but the intentions of the man are unmistakable.) Pedro is about to leave with the man when a policeman causes them to scarper. Buñuel always had a natural fearlessness when it came to such "sensitive" subjects. Of course, it was one of the scenes that outraged Mexican critics, who thought that Buñuel had insulted the honor of Mexico.

What its detractors found most disturbing about Los Olvidados was the total absence of redemption or even remorse. El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) and his gang attack and rob a blind man (even the blind man is a loathsome monster who fondles young girls and whose eyes look like they're glued shut) and a legless beggar; Pedro, who is rejected by his own mother, at least attempts to do the "right thing" according to society's standards, but he becomes implicated in the murder of another boy by El Jaibo. The message of the film, if it can be said to have one, is that Pedro is damned from birth by a society that will not permit him to find, let alone travel, the right path in his life.

There are telltale surrealist touches throughout the film: after the attack on the blind man, Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), he lies on his stomach in the dirt, and Gabriel Figueroa's camera pans to reveal a chicken (which, of course, he cannot see) in front of his face; one of the boys suckles a goat; Pedro dreams that the boy El Jaibo murdered is laughing under his bed, that his mother loves him, embraces him, and offers him a huge steak - but El Jaibo appears and steals it. As he is dying, El Jaibo dreams of a dog running down an endless street. The dreams were shot in slow-motion to heighten their nightmarish qualities.  Surrealism always had a powerfully subversive subtext, as Buñuel's films make abundantly clear.

Over a lifetime of filmgoing, Los Olvidados was always one of those films I had always wanted to see, but never had an opportunity until quite recently. The reason for this is obvious: it is, after all, such an unpleasant subject for a film. Buñuel gives us a guided tour through one of the most uninviting worlds ever caught on film. Shoeshine had at least the comfort that we were in the hands on a filmmaker who cared deeply for the fates of the boys whose stories he was telling. With Buñuel, de Sica's compassion is replaced by a kind if cruel fascination. 

There is no comfort to be found in Los Olvidados, except perhaps in the satisfaction of being shown the truth about the lives of the boys Buñuel follows. I wrote five years ago that, "To be sure, Buñuel wasn’t born to reassure us that we live in best of all possible worlds." Pedro struggles to free himself from being implicated in El Jaibo's crime, but fails and he is murdered by El Jaibo. The police arrive, too late as usual, and gun down El Jaibo. The end of Pedro, his body thrown onto a garbage dump, recalls the end of the Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano: "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."

Despite the outrage and protests of Mexican authorities, Oscar Dancigers got Los Olvidados
a screening at Cannes and Buñuel won the Palm d'Or for Best Director. Miraculously, all of the film's enemies changed their minds about Buñuel and his career in Mexico flourished.


(1) All quotations are from Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).

Charulata

Trying to wash the bad taste of Slumdog Millionaire from my mind, what a relief to turn to the India of classic Satyajit Ray. Ray's work has been highly regarded ever since the release in the West of Pather Panchali (1955), the first film of the Apu Trilogy, I think because it was the first time audiences had seen Indians in a film in which they were not singing and dancing like lunatics. Aside from their novelty (beautiful women in saris, adorned with bracelets and anklets, and dots on their foreheads), Ray's films were informed with what can only be called - for a Westerner - an alien understanding of pacing and rhythm, which is also reflected in traditional Indian music.(1) I would not go so far as John Simon and blame Indian culture itself for the sense of unrelenting lassitude in Ray's films. Ray was evidently making no effort to be authentic - he did not have to. The problem, which Ray understood too well, was in trying to be too authentic, too idiosyncratic, which puts a film in danger of being parochial.

The theme of so many of Ray's films is one person's, man or woman, wishing to escape the confines of a village, a family or a narrow circle of friends into the broader world of opportunity and recognition. Charulata (1964) is based on a novel by Tagore that has the feel of a story by Turgenev or Henry James, about trapped lives and unspoken love. It concerns the neglected young wife of a Calcutta newspaper publisher who, without meaning to, falls for her brother-in-law. Set in the late 19th century, Ray manages to subtly capture the setting of the story, a society that Tagore knew well - educated merchants and entrepreneurs, of scholars and poets who are familiar with their rich culture and with the anti-British political sentiments in The Sentinel, Charlulata's husband's small-circulation newspaper. They speak a Bengali that is liberally sprinkled with English.

There is a garden scene which is justly famous whose beauty may only have been the consequence of the rest of the film being so cooped up in what must have been a stifling house. (2) Charu, as she is called by her husband, sits on a swing in the garden and Ray indulges in an exquisite shot with the camera rocking to and fro with her.(3) When she stops and studies the garden and the world beyond through opera glasses, she spies a woman and child on a distant balcony and is reminded of her childless marriage. The relationship, as always in Indian cinema, is left to be inferred. There is one tearful embrace between Charu and Amal, but it amounts to nothing. Everything is left to the actors' eyes and their gestures, which is handled surprisingly well by Ray.

The acting is excellent from the two male principle actors, Soumitra Chatterjee, who was Ray's alter-ego in fifteen of his films, as Amal and Shailen Mukherjee as Bhupati. Madhabi Mukherjee, however, is merely competent as Charulata, which is unfortunate but does not hurt the film overmuch. The ending is indelible: Bhupati, Charu's husband, has come back after discovering her feelings for his brother. When Charu opens the door, she holds out her hand and tells him to come in. But when he holds out his own hand, Ray freezes the shot. We then see the couple, frozen in a tentative gesture of reconciliation, from other angles - of Charulata beckoning to her husband to come in the door. It has a startling and somewhat terrifying aspect, of being suspended in a moment in time in which characters hang in indecision, that could have different outcomes if only the film were permitted to advance just a few more seconds further.

But the film has, I think, dated drastically - not so much because it is in black-and-white or because of its technical shortcomings. What has dated Charulata is its very qualities as a work of art - its boldness and its confidence, not just in its own creative power, but in an audience, now long gone, that will fully and appreciatively comprehend it. I once compared it to listening to John Coltrane. Such filmmaking required a degree of fearlessness that is by now as dead as a doornail.

(1) The great Ravi Shankar often composed the music for Ray's films. Incidentally, Shankar is the father of Nora Jones. For Charulata, Ray himself composed an effective, understated score.

(2) I live in the Philippines, and I have visited Thailand - neither of which, I am assured, is as hot as India.

(3) Memorably, Jan Troell uses the same camera shot in The Emigrants (1971).