Él: Mad Love

Through the ingenuity of his cinematic staging, Buñuel made the story his own. Everything unfolds through Francisco’s point of view, including the opening sequence—one of the most memorable in the director’s filmography. During a foot-washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday, the camera passes along a row of children’s feet until it reaches those of a woman, sheathed in high heels. Francisco raises his eyes, and Gloria, disturbed, returns his gaze. This is all it takes for Buñuel to convey that troubled forces lurk behind Francisco’s respectable facade. What’s more, he is wearing the sash of a Catholic order. False virtue and self-righteous piety were notions that the director got a kick out of dynamiting.

The rest of the first act, which is absent from the novel, chronicles the beginnings of Francisco and Gloria’s mutual attraction. Their inexplicable desire is the same amour fou extolled by the surrealists, an emotion that Francisco tells his dinner guests “must spring up spontaneously, when two people meet, and know that nothing can part them.” Gloria listens with rapt attention. Far from taking his words as a sign of aberrant character, she decides that very night to tie her fate to his. Up to this point in the film, Francisco and Gloria seem to be descendants of L’âge d’or’s heedless lovers.

Gloria’s entrance into Francisco’s world plays out in the physical space of the protagonist’s house, whose strange opulence looks like a projection of his labyrinthine mind. Buñuel said he had been inspired by a home built by his father, and he references this autobiographical detail in a scene where Francisco’s father is mentioned as the designer of the residence. Production designer Edward Fitzgerald accentuated the house’s art-nouveau motifs to create an overwhelming environment. The winding fretwork decorating the walls gives the characters and the audience a sense of being in a liminal space. One character says that the architect must have been guided by “sentiment, emotion, and instinct, rather than reason.”

The moment when Francisco zigzags up the stairs in the main hall combines formal elegance with a terrifying implication that the character has fallen into a psychotic state. The scene’s hints of expressionism reveal the hand of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, who was a legendary figure of Mexican cinema’s golden age—a time, stretching from the thirties to the late fifties, when the country’s film industry reached new heights of commercial success and international recognition. In Los olvidados (1950), his first collaboration with Buñuel, Figueroa established himself as a great portraitist of the dispossessed, and his talent led Diego Rivera to consider him an honorary member of the Mexican muralist movement. But Figueroa was an aesthete above all, and this caused friction with Buñuel, who had no interest in sophisticated compositions or background lighting.

In Él, the two artists managed to reach an equilibrium: Francisco’s house offered Figueroa a perfect zone in which to play with chiaroscuro, and Buñuel gained a visual tool with which to express his protagonist’s inner turmoil. The house is not the only location in the film that reflects Francisco’s state of mind. There’s also Guanajuato, a city of winding streets where the couple spend their honeymoon. And there’s the cathedral bell tower from which Francisco watches passersby, comparing them to worms. 

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Arturo de Córdova in the lead role. The actor’s distinguished bearing and cosmopolitan air lend credibility to the way that other characters crumple into submission before Francisco. By this point in his career, de Córdova had acted in dozens of golden-age films, made by directors such as Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, Julio Bracho, and Roberto Gavaldón, and alongside icons like Dolores del Río, María Félix, and Silvia Pinal. But it wasn’t just his fame and good looks that made him an ideal choice for the movie. Though his appearance had gotten him typecast as a heartthrob, many of his characters bordered on madness. In Juan Bustillo Oro’s The Man Without a Face (1950), de Córdova plays a killer tormented by his repressed identity, an affliction that anticipates Francisco’s psychological collapse. Buñuel pushed de Córdova to the limits of his ability to project irrationality. One gets the impression that the filmmaker and the star understood each other intuitively. The actor, for his part, discovered that Francisco was, on some level, Buñuel; critics even observed that the actor’s heavy gait was similar to the director’s.

De Córdova’s presence wasn’t enough to save Él from commercial failure. Audiences laughed at its depictions of paranoia, as in the scene where Francisco sticks a needle through a keyhole in a hotel door. The film played in theaters for only three weeks, unsettling viewers who perhaps expected a conventional drama. Though some critics recognized Él’s surrealist roots and praised Buñuel for being faithful to his artistic impulses, the public found this story of an unhappy marriage disturbing, confrontational, and full of nightmarish images.

The period preceding Él had been one of both disappointment and triumph for Buñuel. The onset of Francoism had led him to leave Spain, and he had lost a job at New York’s Museum of Modern Art after Salvador Dalí called him an atheist and a communist in his autobiography. Unemployed and with a family to support, Buñuel accepted producer Óscar Dancigers’s invitation to move to Mexico and direct Gran Casino (1947), a musical melodrama with two famous actors already attached: Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque. Buñuel didn’t care for the stars, the script, or the mawkish tone of the whole enterprise, and the film was a flop. But just a few years later, Dancigers allowed Buñuel to forget about financial pressures and make something that interested him. The result was the landmark Los olvidados, which was removed from theaters within days of its release after offending politicians, intellectuals, artists, and audiences. But after winning the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Buñuel went from being a foreigner who had defamed Mexico to an artist who had exalted the country’s name abroad, and the film ended up returning to Mexican screens for a two-month run.

But this new prestige didn’t guarantee box-office success, and Buñuel needed to make money. That’s why, between 1950 and 1953, he directed films for hire—Susana, Daughter of Deceit, Ascent to Heaven, A Woman Without Love, and The Brute—all of which were conceived by their producers to attract mass audiences. Their reception was modest: none were commercial failures, but neither were any received with particular enthusiasm. Though the presence of Buñuelian imagery and scenarios in these films has led to their critical reevaluation in later years (Susana and Ascent to Heaven now attract especially lively commentary), the director considered them minor works, marred by hurried shoots, improvised production conditions, and themes and stars not of his choosing.

Él may not have been a hit, but it was an extraordinary return to form, and it remains one of Buñuel’s most important works. The paradox at its heart is that a film that produces so much dizziness and discomfort can at the same time become an object of obsession. As in his earliest work, Buñuel invites us to peek inside his mind and to be surprised and captivated by what we discover there. For today’s audiences, Él reaffirms a right that sometimes seems lost: the one that art grants us to imagine and feel freely.

In his autobiography, Buñuel describes the film as “the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made . . . He increasingly perceives reality according to his obsession, until everything in his life revolves around it.” The paranoiac, we might add, can’t tell invention from reality; the poet, aware of that boundary, creates parallel worlds and sometimes decides to inhabit them. In the final scene of Él, Buñuel subtly merges these two identities. We see Francisco confined in a monastery, where he seems to have regained his sanity. Then he walks away with his back to the camera, moving again in a zigzag. Here the character isn’t played by de Córdova. Beneath the habit and cowl, it is Buñuel who is walking.

Translated from the Spanish by Will Noah