Film noir is not a genre. Neither is surrealist cinema. Too often, audiences label anything in a movie that seems weirdly incongruous as surreal. It’s not at all the same thing.
What both of these styles have in common is a way to visually express any parts that a film is constructed of in ways that go beyond any intellectual cognition. The language of emotions. A lexicon of textures. Speaking through the senses.
El bruto (1953, Luis Buñuel) depicts the brutality of how it feels to lose your true love. In cinema, a home can signal the image system of one’s heart. It’s an outward manifestation of our willful resistance against our own mortality. We’re here for such a short time, but much like our very identity, we build something to last. Something that we rest assured in knowing will be with us for the rest of our lives.
The community of poor blue collar wretches being evicted from the barrio slum are an emotional transcription of what it’s like to lose the love of your life. That home was where their inner life was nurtured and safe. And then all of the sudden, without any reason, without knowing what they did wrong, they can be kicked out on the street never to return. When they fight the eviction in that first scene, desperately pleading for any kind of answer as what they’re to do now, think about how their landlord ANDRÉS answers them: “That’s your business. There are plenty of other houses.” After having your heart broke isn’t that all your friends really can offer: there’s someone else out there for you.
And like the most cynical of film noirs, here humans are no better than cattle, despite any sensitivity, optimism, hope or love they may aspire to. BRUTO works in a slaughterhouse. When he has to leave that job, he goes to work with PALOMA in a butcher shop. The tenement building is too small and has too many people packed in there. And when they finally put him down, it’s fittingly by “one to the head.”
El bruto is the first film through which I’ve really fully appreciated the genius of Buñuel’s talent with visual motifs. Most obvious a burning flame as sex. One could read something into the three instances of Bruto having sex as follows: (1.) He could have raped Paloma or at the very least it was rough, not shown at all of course, but what is shown is him putting the candle out by smoldering the wick between his fingers, i.e., through force. (2.) When Paloma visits Bruto with the full intention of seducing him, when they go off to the bed, what is shown are the two raw steaks sizzling on the grill and could be read as more like an animal lust. (3.) When Bruto brings his newlywed bride MECHE back to their hovel, we see the candle melt down to nothing on its own—something like purity.
The whole length of the narrative where Bruto and Meche fall in love is tenderly romantic. The scene on their wedding night is so simple. She’s a virgin. She’s chaste. She’s shy. And offscreen as the candle melts down we only hear their voices, and she starts crying after they’ve finished. And when Bruto goes to sleep on the floor, leaving her to have the small bed he made for her she adds one last comment: “good night.”
But most of the film is brutally disturbing. One more note about visual motifs that could be deciphered from the chickens is like, Bruto kills Meche’s father and when Bruto flees the mob of carpenters and unwittingly hides at Meche’s house he kills her hen with his bare hands to keep it from making any noise. But Bruto later brings her a new hen along with a bunch of baby chicks. And the last scene of the movie, after Andrés has been slain, when Paloma is confronted by that ominous apparition rooster of course it feels like Andrés in a scary as shit way.
Brutality is the theme of this movie in many ways. Bruto is the beast who takes advantage of his size to intimidate and assert his will through oppressive dominance. But Paloma is his double. She’s emotionally brutal and takes advantage of her sexuality to assert her own will in the same way. She’s cold to her husband Andrés and fends off all of his sexual advances. She manipulates Andrés by making him think Bruto assaulted her. She wants to own and control Bruto, not love him.
But whereas Bruto internally fights his oppressive nature, Paloma does not. She’s the worst. Another evocatively coded image is how when she puts the idea into Andrés’ head about eliminating the agitators she does so by decapitating the flowers from their stems.
And just a few scattered notes in closing: the slaughterhouse location is obviously real, and filmed with such a photographic quality it adds so much to the noir canvas, along with the chase scene through the lumberyard with its geometric dark shadowy world. The scene where Meche removes the nail from Bruto is an overt reference to Catholicism, or at the very least a vague allusion to the crucifixion. After Meche’s father dies and she pawns his toolbox with his name on it (Carmelo González), what a tearjerker moment, it can also be read through a Catholic lens in that an innocent carpenter was sacrificed for leading the people of their barrio to salvation.
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