“For the ungodly have said, reasoning with themselves but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell or from the other world. For we are born from nothing and after this, we shall be as if we had not been. For the breath of our nostrils is smoke, and speech a spark to move our heart, which being put out, our body shall be ashes and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud and be dispersed as mist, which is driven away by the sun beams, and overpowered with the heat. And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.”
Where on earth did Abismos de pasión (1954, Luis Buñuel) come from? And why do I feel like it’s the most moving love story I’ve ever seen? Abismos de pasión is about ALEJANDRO and his undying love for CATALINA. But really it’s about how all of us as humans hate each other and hurt one another. It’s about brutality. What else is there to make movies about?
The backstory is Alejandro grew up with these rich kids Catalina and RICARDO. And this is where Buñuel gets ahold of the social class dimension to the story. Alejandro was treated as a slave growing up. He was an orphan taken in by Ricardo, who made him sleep in the stables and fed him scraps. Yet Alejandro and Catalina fell in love. And then Catalina married Ricardo. Why didn’t she marry Alejandro, if she loved him? Because everyone, including Ricardo’s sister ISABEL and Catalina’s brother EDUARDO, hate Alejandro. So he left.
But plot twist, and where our story begins, one rainy night Alejandro returns, now rich, intent on taking back his true love Catalina, and desperate to seek revenge against all—including Catalina! Because in Abismos de pasión Alejandro and Catalina love each other so much that they want to die. But they also constantly call each other out for how much pain they cause each other and seem to be in some competition to prove who loves whom more.
Cinematically, no joke this is legit a Buñuel masterpiece. From the moment Alejandro arrives, in a rainstorm, and whose passion of course leads him to breaking and entering the house to find Catalina, cue the soundtrack blasting the Liebestod—oh yeah, get ready because on top of a wall to wall emotional underscoring musical track there’s mostly excerpts from Tristan and Isolde throughout. The tone of this thing is over the top melodrama moody pain romantic.
But the image system is cruelty to animals. Returning to Buñuel’s fondness for entomology, Ricardo is introduced mounting a live butterfly for dissection. (We’ll see later his collection of butterflies, moths, and other insects in framed cases is huge.) And when Isabel walks up and asks him why he would torture them, it’s clear by his reply he doesn’t see it as torture. Throughout the rest of the film, there’s also the old man dropping the live frog into the incense he's burning; the excruciating slaughter of the hog in front of Isabel; and best of all the scene where Eduardo grabs the live moth and throws it onto the web and the spider emerges from its nest to eat it.
There’s also a subtle thing going on with dead trees. The first shot is a dead tree full of buzzards that scatter at the sound of a GUNSHOT, offscreen fired by Catalina to scare Isabel. (Seriously, this whole movie is about everyone hurting each other out of hate, spite, love, or fun.) When Alejandro first kisses Isabel, it’s in a ditch and there’s a twisting fallen dead tree next to them. At Catalina’s funeral procession there’s a tall dead tree looming in the foreground.
Also more having to do with a thematic cinematic touch, early on there’s a line of dialogue Catalina says that’s something like: “…because I say the things I feel.” And it hit me this is another instance of what Buñuel does best. It’s also what he does as a surrealist. It’s what cinema should aspire to do: communicate through the language of emotions. Emotions exist outside of cognition. It’s a contradiction of terms. It’s the greatest strength of art and why we need it so much.
My main idea about Buñuel is his depiction of something like with infatuation there is no distinction between illusion and delusion. And in the ending of Abismos de pasión I found exactly that. When Alejandro breaks into the crypt, prybar ripping the chains open, and he descends below to open Catalina's coffin, once he reaches towards her body and touches her his hand is full of dirt falling away through his fingers—so much meaning in that image. But as he realizes she’s gone forever and so is the only love he’ll ever know, he turns around and sees her behind him. The ghostly apparition of her, as his bride, calls his name. And as he recognizes all he’s ever wanted more than anything, a jump cut flickers and replaces her with Eduardo aiming a rifle firing a full round into his face. The illusion of true love. The delusion of true love.
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