Él (1953)
Country: MEX
Technical: bw/1.37:1 92m
Director: Luis Buñuel
Cast: Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Manuel Dondé
Synopsis:
A confirmed bachelor meets and seduces his feminine ideal from her fiancé, but then mistreats her abominably because of his paranoid jealousy.
Review:
A film in which, by all accounts, Buñuel put much of himself, in terms of his possessiveness and insistence on patriarchal practices. The script plays out, therefore, in an hysterical nightmare of self-torment, with the wife exhibiting superhuman reserves of tolerance and compassion. The detail of the valet's implied molestation of female staff near the start is an interesting one, as it presents a far more conventional form of misogynistic behaviour. Structurally, of course, the film resembles That Obscure Object of Desire very closely in its persistent frustration of sexual congress, though the cause there is quite different, and the splitting of personality traits occurs in the female. As frequently elsewhere, the director employs internal as well as external narrative techniques.
Country: MEX
Technical: bw/1.37:1 92m
Director: Luis Buñuel
Cast: Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Manuel Dondé
Synopsis:
A confirmed bachelor meets and seduces his feminine ideal from her fiancé, but then mistreats her abominably because of his paranoid jealousy.
Review:
A film in which, by all accounts, Buñuel put much of himself, in terms of his possessiveness and insistence on patriarchal practices. The script plays out, therefore, in an hysterical nightmare of self-torment, with the wife exhibiting superhuman reserves of tolerance and compassion. The detail of the valet's implied molestation of female staff near the start is an interesting one, as it presents a far more conventional form of misogynistic behaviour. Structurally, of course, the film resembles That Obscure Object of Desire very closely in its persistent frustration of sexual congress, though the cause there is quite different, and the splitting of personality traits occurs in the female. As frequently elsewhere, the director employs internal as well as external narrative techniques.
Country: MEX
Technical: bw/1.37:1 92m
Director: Luis Buñuel
Cast: Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Manuel Dondé
Synopsis:
A confirmed bachelor meets and seduces his feminine ideal from her fiancé, but then mistreats her abominably because of his paranoid jealousy.
Review:
A film in which, by all accounts, Buñuel put much of himself, in terms of his possessiveness and insistence on patriarchal practices. The script plays out, therefore, in an hysterical nightmare of self-torment, with the wife exhibiting superhuman reserves of tolerance and compassion. The detail of the valet's implied molestation of female staff near the start is an interesting one, as it presents a far more conventional form of misogynistic behaviour. Structurally, of course, the film resembles That Obscure Object of Desire very closely in its persistent frustration of sexual congress, though the cause there is quite different, and the splitting of personality traits occurs in the female. As frequently elsewhere, the director employs internal as well as external narrative techniques.