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The fable of the razor and the melody, finally fused before a mirror by a small slash. ("Just use an electric shaver" is Justice's shrugging verdict.) Luis Buñuel has a brilliant prologue to set it up, Archibaldo the little bourgeois entranced by a supposedly magical music box. His mind turns to death and the scolding governess is struck by a bullet, the tableau mort—blood bubbling from her neck, skirt hiked to expose thighs wrapped in stockings—gives the boy the frisson of all frissons. An artist who's "amusing despite a doleful air," the grown man (Ernesto Alonso) locates the lost toy in a pawnshop, and its tinkling promptly turns into electric notes drilling into his psyche. To recreate that instant of macabre delectation becomes his obsession: "I could kill her cheerfully," but reality refuses to play ball with the wannabe ripper. The "potentially great criminal" as deflated bachelor is the grand joke, the dutiful nun (Chabela Durán), the casino coquette (Rita Macedo) and the fake-pious bride (Ariadna Welter) all meet their ends in ways that rob the protagonist of the joys of murder. Emerson's "act quite easily contemplated" versus the prison of aestheticism, the hollowness of purity ideals and macho honor, "lots of blood and little sense." Having contrived a triangle with a teasing model (Miroslava Stern) and a mannequin, Archibaldo is left pressing his lips against the dummy's—dragged into the incinerator, the effigy vibrates when licked by flames, liquefies in an unforgettable close-up. The central Buñuel, midway between the early savagery and the later urbanity, a most dapper derangement of normalcy. (Alonso's resemblance to Rex Harrison points up the debt to Unfaithfully Yours.) The figure sauntering down the road at the close might be the auteur himself, the mischievous maniac reconciled with the world's endless reserves of comic horror. With Andrea Palma, Rodolfo Landa, José María Linares-Rivas, and Carlos Riquelme. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |