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Lang's Human Desire has the locomotive locked in its rails like characters in their fates, in the same year Luis Buñuel sees his own vehicle ditch the schedule and wander into the night. Christmastime in Mexico City, a thousand proletarian tales, here's the one about Keaton's The General reimagined with Abbott and Costello. Too much efficiency is enough reason to sack the two transit workers (Carlos Navarro, Fernando Soto), the streetcar they've just fixed has an appointment with the junk heap. "Bueno... ¿Y Qué?" Full of frustration and beer, the blokes sneak into the depot and take the metallic hobo out for a spin, just "some fresh air" before the dismantlement. The tiny joyride balloons, first with the coquette (Lilia Prado) and then with a slew of surprise passengers: Slaughterhouse employees, larcenous nuns, crooked businessmen, a whole classroom of schoolboys. All the way down the line, "the education of the public." Slabs of beef hang over bourgeois top hats in this sly companion piece to Mexican Bus Ride, another mobile community brimming with quotidian strangeness and anarchic impulses. Buñuel gets the party going marvelously with a Biblical play in a raucous ballroom—Lucifer gargles his drink and trades angelic wings for bovine horns, Eve in her leopard-print swimsuit tastes the fruit of a cardboard garden. (Ray recalls it with a smile in Pather Panchali.) People enjoy the free ride, except for the suspicious gringa ("Hmm. Smells like communism to me!") and the faithful retiree (Agustín Isunza) who has served the company his whole life and has only a heart attack to show for it. "Aren't you a little old to play with trains?" It ends in tandem with the work shift, another day of subversive illusions. With Miguel Manzano, Guillermo Bravo Sosa, and José Pidal. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |