El

Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova

Luis Buñuel's Él (Him), from 1953, is probably the most personal of his masterpieces from his Mexican period. Buñuel and Luis Alcorize's script was derived from Mercedes Pinto's 1926 novel Pensamientos. That novel was a roman à clef about Pinto's relationship with her jealous husband who descended into paranoia when he could not control her. The first part of the film focuses on Francisco (Arturo de Córdova), a middle aged business magnate and his wooing of the much younger Gloria (Delia Garcés). Francisco spies Gloria in church during a Maundy Thursday service and with one look at her ankles, the torch is lit. Buñuel indulges full bore in his foot fetishism in this one. Even though Gloria is seeing the dependable Raul (Luis Beristáin), an employee of Francisco's, she is swept away by Francisco's profession of love and he soon manipulates her into a hasty marriage.

The second part of the film is a flashback that is from Gloria's perspective, as she recounts the horror of her married life to Raul some time in the future. Francisco's jealousy erupts almost immediately after they pledge their troth, ruining their wedding night and honeymoon. He moves her into his palatial family estate, an art nouveau palace with surrealistic flourishes, brilliantly designed by frequent Buñuel collaborator Edward Fitzgerald. This house soon becomes the prison it resembles on the outside, a gilded cage for Gloria. Francisco's behavior descends into the pathological and goads Buñuel and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa into some of their most disturbing imagery: a pin through a keyhole with the intention of blinding a imagined peeper, Francisco collecting tools in order to sew up Gloria's vagina; a harbinger of That Obscure Object of Desire. It is no surprise that Él tanked with critics and audiences in the repressed 1950s. There is a bell tower scene that prefigures Vertigo, Hitchcock was an avowed admirer of Buñuel, in which Francisco threatens to throw Gloria to her doom and castigates the people below as "worms".

Gloria tries to find an ally who will help her in her plight, but no one will listen to her. Francisco's servants, his business associates, the local curate, all buy into Francisco's projected image as magnanimous yet traditional bourgeois grandee. Even Gloria's mother is fooled. When Gloria goes to her mother for counsel, she responds by, in essence, telling Gloria that boys will be boys. The final third of the film goes back to Francisco's perspective as he becomes more paranoid and delusional. He stalks Gloria after she wisely leaves him and endeavors to get out of Dodge. Francisco mistakes a couple for Gloria and Raul and follows  them into the church we encountered earlier in the film, bringing us full circle. Francisco imagines that the parishioners are mocking him. Buñuel cuts between reality and Francisco's delusions in purposefully crude cuts, the line being thin between reality and delusion. The coda, a sop to the conventions of melodrama, shows Gloria wed to Raul. They are parenting Francisco Jr. Francisco has retreated from society and is now a brother in a monastery. His mustache, an emblem of his machismo, is gone. The final shot is of Francisco walking a crooked path, as he did on the stairs of his mansion. His madness still lingers.

The fact that it is Buñuel in a cassock in this last shot is indicative of his identification with the divided nature of Francisco. To the world Buñuel was an icon of Surrealism and Leftist humanism, or, as Dali dismissed him, an atheist and a Communist. At home though, he was a traditional Spanish patriarch, stern and unyielding. He demanded unconditional fealty from his wife and children. Disobedience was not to be tolerated. Now, the fact that Él can be read as an auto-critique makes me think that Buñuel was not the domestic tyrant that some have made him out to be. Still, boys will be boys. He does deemphasize the theme of divorce and the difficulty of obtaining one in a Catholic country compared to the original novel. The subject is briefly mentioned, but then ignored. Buñuel was so in thrall to his own Romantic agonies to ever be fully sympathetic to feminism. 

Él may have the best lead performances in any Buñuel film. The line on him is that he let his professional performers be while micro-managing his amateur ones. If this is true, and I've read and seen nothing to contradict this, then he was very fortunate in the casting of Delia Garcés and Arturo de Córdova. Garcés was an Argentine actress who took a hiatus from her homeland with her husband during the Perón era. We can glean what Francisco sees in her, she is a dish, but Garcés gives Gloria a backbone even when Francisco tries to spatchcock her. Cordova was the greatest leading man of the Mexican cinema, appearing in over a hundred Mexican features and quite a few American ones (like For Whom The Bell Tolls). One of the delights of Él is watching Córdova and Buñuel gleefully deconstruct Córdova's image as a romantic leading man.