A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama “Él” amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, “This Strange Passion.”
One of the rediscoveries of last year’s Buñuel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Él” opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration.
The initial sequence, filmed in the nave of a 16th-century Mexico City cathedral, is a well-attended Holy Thursday Mass. As the camera lavishes attention on ritual foot-washing, so does the suavely aristocratic Francisco Galván (Arturo de Córdova). Then his gaze strays from the row of bare feet waiting to be washed and kissed by attending priests to a well-shod foot belonging to a well-bred señorita, Gloria (Delia Garcés) — and thus, a mad love is born.
Francisco, a wealthy, middle-aged virgin, obsessed with regaining ownership of once-upon-a-time family property, turns the force of his pathology on Gloria. He successfully woos her away from her fiancé and, starting on their wedding night, makes her life a living hell. Oscillating between insane jealousy and abject apologies (but ever aroused by the sight of her feet), he becomes increasingly abusive, mentally and physically. At one point, anticipating the climax of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he finagles her to the top of a mission bell tower and, suddenly enraged, tries to throw her off.
Throughout, the madman is protected by his wealth, defended by the Catholic Church and even by Gloria’s mother. “Él” has been taken as a parody of machismo, but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability. Behind the stone facade of Francisco’s colonial mansion lies a clutter of chandeliers, tchotchkes and Jugendstil-patterned portals. Adapted from a quasi-autobiographical novel by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto, “Él” was further informed by the antics of Buñuel’s brother-in-law and, he’s suggested, his own dreams.
Arriving in Cannes two years after Buñuel’s triumphant comeback with the anti-neorealist slum drama “Los Olvidados,” “Él” was dismissed by many, including the jury president, Jean Cocteau, as a commercial sellout. The unimpressed New York Times reviewer, A.H. Weiler, termed the film “an elementary and uninspired study of abnormal psychology.” (Still, no less an authority than Jacques Lacan considered “Él” to be exemplary, and the knowledgeable French critic Georges Sadoul recognized the film as an update of “L’Age d’Or,” the 1930 Buñuel-Dalí collaboration that incited a riot.)
“Él” is so blandly outrageous that it is easy to pass over its affronts. One night, Francisco appears with cotton gauze, scissors, a needle and thread and some heavy rope, hovering over his sleeping wife. To imagine his plan is to become implicated in his craziness. Inevitably, Francisco’s final break with reality occurs in the same church where the movie opens (and includes a physical attack on his family priest).
A coda reveals Francisco living in a monastery. “Faith has become his shield against the world,” a brother explains. Having begun by identifying religious ritual with fetishism, “Él” concludes by equating devotion and paranoia. The revelations of the jolting postscript are all the more powerful if one knows that the cowled figure in the last shot is the director himself.
Él
Through March 20, Film Forum, Manhattan, filmforum.org.
