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"La vida es divertida... y extraña." The Rules of the Game is the template, the famous cake gag from From Soup to Nuts is recreated early on. Calle de la Providencia, dinner at the mansion after the opera, twenty guests dressed to the nines. Polite applause for the piano recital, toxic barbs underneath bland pleasantries. ("In three months she'll be completely bald," says the doctor of his cancerous patient.) It's late, the swells lounge around the salon and get ready to sleep on sofas and rugs, to the vexation of the hosts (Enrique Rambal, Lucy Gallardo). "Why don't they leave?" Trapped for no rational reason, their decorum dissolving and their tuxedos and gowns growing tattered, they contemplate the invisible barrier that might be the screen's fourth wall. Luis Buñuel's masterpiece of sinister drollery, a wicked reaction to the La Dolce Vita-Marienbad-La Notte decaying-soirée sweepstakes. Departing servants are compared to rats abandoning the sinking ship, the castaways camp out in the living room, dismantled furniture feeds their bonfire. "The disheveled look suits you." Water from flower vases and wall pipes, the majordomo (Claudio Brook) can whip up a tasty bowl of paper. The lecherous conductor ("an incubus"), high-strung lad and overprotective sister, closets for lovers and corpses. Kabbalah and Freemasons, sacrificial lambs and bellowing bears, drugs in a box and feathers in a purse. The severed hand from Un Chien Andalou makes a cameo as time seems to collapse, "it feels like we've always been here." La Valkiria (Silvia Pinal) drifts through, at last she figures out that tradition's rituals must be repeated for the spell to be broken. The "rudeness, filth and violence" of existential paralysis do not vanish but jump from one institution to another, Buñuel refines his savage joke in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. With Jacqueline Andere, Augusto Benedico, César del Campo, Nadia Haro Oliva, Enrique García Álvarez, Luis Beristáin, Xavier Loyá, Ofelia Guilmáin, and Tito Junco. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |