The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

Ensayo de un crimen (1955, Luis Buñuel) uses the male ego and its infatuation with women to construct an elaborate system of illusion and confusion. ARCHIBALDO DE LA CRUZ is as mixed up as they said he was. Time has proven so. But to what avail?

     The set-up of the story begins with Archibaldo as a child. He’s a spoiled brat whose governess tells him a tale about a music box that when you play it, has the power to kill whomever you’re thinking about if you wish them dead. He does. And she dies. We get a shot of her body lying on the floor, the frame cutting off her head above the neck—and emphasis on the thigh high stockings she’s wearing. This motif begins to illustrate how mixed up he is into adulthood. His sexual desire for women is linked with the impulse to murder them.

     The film pathologizes infatuation. Archibaldo defines himself as being unable to decide whether he wants to be either a criminal or a saint. And there are other references to this, like when he sees LAVINIA in the nightclub, and the shot of her is framed with flames in the foreground, he says she looks pretty like a witch at the stake or Joan of Arc—a criminal or a saint. This is the foundation of how mixed up he is because of how conflicted he is and confused about his desire for women.

 

The film isn’t meant to be read literally. If Buñuel is expressing through cinema a language of emotions, the urge to kill these women is code for his infatuation over these women. We don’t know what makes up his desire. There’s no inventory to categorize it. But it’s probably something like sexual desire, kink, vanilla, love, beauty, marriage, fear, loyalty, apprehension, jealousy, and paranoia, or something along those lines. 

     And what do we get through the emotional communication if murder is a way to express his conflicted infatuation? By planning the murders, he is willing to give up everything, risk going to prison, and he’s tortured with guilt. When he tries to tell CARLOTA about his drive to murder women (his inner feelings) he can’t. When he turns himself in to the authorities, they don’t believe him and laugh it off. Because this romantic infatuation with women only exists in his head, and he can’t put it into words in any way that anyone would understand and even if he could, they wouldn’t care.

     Because as Buñuel has shown, with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. When I first started working on this claim I meant cinematically Buñuel uses illusions to symbolize the delusions his male leads are obsessed with. And one of the best examples in Ensayo de un crimen is Lavinia and the mannequin modeled after her. It’s not difficult to see that the reason the mannequin looks so much liker her in some shots is because it’s the real actress with effects make-up on, holding very still. The mannequin is important because it shows that Archibaldo objectifies women—especially the scene where he kisses the mannequin on the mouth and then kisses the real Lavinia on the mouth. But by using the real actress as mannequin it’s also as if it’s emphasizing the illusion that for us even Lavinia is fake because cinema is itself an illusion. The camera lies 24 times per second. Think about also in the wedding photo, once Carlota is framed by the camera within the frame, ALEJANDRO shoots her. In this film true love is an illusion, a lie.

     At the wedding there’s that conversation among the PRIEST, THE COLONEL, and THE INSPECTOR where they all agree the presentation is all that matters—this blatant hypocrisy. That there isn’t going to be a bride because she gets murdered, or that the bride doesn’t love the groom doesn’t matter, because what’s important for the priest is that the wedding was held in the Catholic church with its pomp like a blanket of poetry. And the other guys cry over the colors of the regiment as to prove their patriotism. The illusion of a wedding as sanctified institution. The illusion of a flag as patriotism. 

 

Oh yeah this film is also really funny. The ending is completely absurdist and seems to mimic commercial roms. Archibaldo sees that huge grasshopper on a tree in the park and wants to squash it with his cane. But Lavinia happens to randomly show up and they leave happily ever after. Because despite all that he’s been through and how mixed up he is, of course he still wants to fall in love. The illusion can exist in the movies. The illusion can exist in real life.