Ensayo de un Crimen

Ernesto Alonso and Miroslava

Luis Buñuel's Ensayo de un Crimen (Rehearsal for a Crime) first premiered in Mexico in 1955. It got a belated release in the USA under the clunky title The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. The film is based on a 1944 novel by Rodolfo Usigli, better known in Mexico as a dramatist. Usigli was a socially committed leftist playwright whose work was on occasion banned by his own government. He felt that the ideals of the Mexican Revolution had been betrayed, a notion that floats beneath the surface of the luxe, decadent, and evil bourgeois milieu of Ensayo de un Crimen. Usigli's politics jibe well with that of Buñuel's. A wedding in the third act of the film provides Bunuel an opportunity to satirize his usual targets: the unholy trinity of Church, state, and the aristocracy. To this tale of a music box that can conjure death, Buñuel lays on his trademark perversity and surrealism. A supremely crafted black comedy, Ensayo de un Crimen is among the best of the twenty or so films Buñuel made in Mexico between 1946 and 1965.

The film begins with a flashback to Archie's youth during the time of the Mexican Revolution. As a device, this allows Bunuel to sneak in some horrifying images from that era which we glimpse in a book. Then we meet the spoilt young Archie who is gifted a music box by his mother. That night, Archie's governess tell her charge a folk tale of a music box than can cause the death of one's enemies. Archie tests the box and his governess subsequently dies from a stray bullet shot by a rowdy bandolero in the street. Moving forward from the flashback, we see a now suave and grown up Archie (Ernesto Alonso) unburdening himself about his sins to a nun. Archie admits to the nun that he enjoyed the power his musical box gave him and in just a jiff the nun is herself deceased at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Archie tries to claim that he is culpable to the police and, in another flurry of flashbacks, he reviews the body count he has accumulated.  

Any film that hinges on a haunted musical box is playing with the viewer's suspension of disbelief. Similarly, the device of the flashback, which Buñuel utilizes gleefully, places the actions of the film outside the normal realms of time and space. Ensayo de un Crimen even employs a flash forward which turns out to be misleading. The sole touchstone we have throughout the film is Archie himself, who, despite his moral perfidy, is debonair and charming if a little weird. He wears a cape unironically and only drinks milk. He lives in splendor, seemingly magically, and indulges himself in a curious hobby, pottery. He romances, and contemplates killing, three women, each of whom has an inappropriate lover either due to age or marital status. Archie is never quite able to put the kibosh to his victims. They manage to die from other hands with, of course, the unseen help of the music box. 

Archie, thus, suffers the pain of contemplating his crimes without the pleasure of committing the deeds. His frustration is with both sex and death which are linked visually in the film from the get go: Archie's gaze goes from the face of his governess as she lies dying to her exposed legs. At the finale, he is able to renounce the music box's legacy by tossing it in a lake. He reunites with the one remaining femme who, earlier in the film, he has ritually killed by incinerating a mannequin of her. The melting figure is given loving close-ups by Buñuel. To further blur whatever boundaries remain, Buñuel alternates between shots of the actual mannequin and his actress (the doomed Miroslava) done up as the mannequin. Before the final walk off, Archie contemplates a mantis for a moment or two. We wonder if he will squash the creature, but he leaves the bug be. Animals recur throughout the films of Buñuel, a perpetual reminder from the master that man, despite his pretensions, is a finite creature, too. Perhaps Archie, freed from the music box, can lead a normal life of blissful domesticity. Behind the polished actors and production values, we can hear Buñuel suppress a chortle. Ensayo de un Crimen is a diabolically fun provocation.