Poison arrow

The only rule in movies is that they have to have a story. Why? To varying degrees films have proven adept in character, dialogue, genre, setting, and tone; but they can get away with lacking in any of these categories and still work as long as they have a plot. Audiences don’t want cinema for the sake of art. They want a story. Because some part of them is so afraid of the possibility that their own life doesn’t follow a clear path that gets resolved in the end with a specific purpose that they need reassurance, and to buy into these little simulations of meaning to numb their own existential dread.

     What do audiences call a movie without a discernable plot? An art film. What do they call a film that otherwise neglects to tell a clear story with a satisfying resolution? Unreliable narrator. The audience doesn’t have the capacity to process these kinds of narratives. Nor should we be expected to—because they’re always off-putting, conceptual, tedious, or from the perspective of a character losing their grasp on reality.

     But what if there were a film that communicated an emotional truth, while despite breaking these rules nevertheless maintained a cohesion of order through a storytelling that corresponded to its own internal design, and was easy and satisfying to follow? Is to communicate through emotions an impossible contradiction?

 

Él (1953, Luis Buñuel) concisely depicts the masculine ego in relation to its intense sexual desire for a woman. Whereas domestic melodrama, sometimes referred to as woman’s picture, expressionistically utilizes heightened emotion, Él expresses its own delirious reasoning from the perspective of the male genitals. And what makes this satire so much fun is Buñuel puts a bourgeois Catholic who doesn’t have a job or any family—a character who only exists to capture a woman—at the center of this work of art that uses cinema to prove through analogy that with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. 

     The image system used in Él is set up in the first scene. During a Catholic mass, PADRE VELASCO is anointing the feet of a queue of altar boys, adoringly, bestowing each with a soft lingering foot kiss. As DON FRANCSISCO assists him with the holy water, we get a camera dolly of the feet of congregants that halts and doubles back to those of a woman in high heels. The rest of the film will hinge on Don Francisco’s conflict between guilt based repressed sexual desire and its resultant confusion with what to do with GLORIA as object of his amorous lust. 

 

The greatest strength of Él is that each aspect of its form that’s intentionally ambiguous is so in order to convey a sexual/emotional truth. Illusion/delusion. None of this film is meant to be read literally. Of course, there is clearly the possibility to read it as none of it ever even happened. As early as the honeymoon in Guanajuato, in a scene where Gloria snaps a photo of Don Francisco in front of some antique architecture, when it’s his turn to take her picture, he declines. How far would I be reaching if I said maybe it’s because in the diegesis of the narrative he has a picture of himself in front of that building but not one of Gloria because they never actually went there together? Or maybe they did. Intentionally ambiguous.

     Él speaks to me. The scene in the belltower when Don Francisco takes Gloria up there to reconcile after a nasty fight, then looks at the crowd below and tells her they’re all worms and no one would see him if he strangled her and threw her body off the top is so much already, but when he adds “I was only joking,” that’s the Buñuel touch on full display. Él is like one big joke you shouldn’t be allowed to laugh at. And how about when Don Francisco is at his wit’s end, a broken man, crying to his confidante butler PABLO, desperately asking what he should do about his wife Gloria and Pablo says divorce her. Don Francisco replies “What about kill her?” That is the funniest dialogue in the movie for me. That’s what surrealism is for me.

     Él isn’t subject to the healthy morally right way women should be treated that’s deemed fit and approved by society. It’s about the opposite. It’s about how there can be a man who everyone sees only through his public persona, and the difference with which he shows himself to be in the privacy of a woman who entices his sexual desires. Yeah it’s wrong. But Él dares to make a comedy out of it. Maybe it’s okay to laugh at how scary it can be to know the penis wants what the penis wants as long as we know it’s wrong?