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You can do your best thinking on the bus, says the Repo Man sage, and that movie has a literal ascent to heaven. Happy the village without a church, still the young newlyweds (Esteban Márquez and Carmelita González) have their trip to honeymoon island interrupted by family business. An avaricious brood around the expiring matriarch (Paz Villegas), the answer is an honest attorney in Petatlán, a long way for the good son to go. Steered by a jolly sentimentalist (Luis Aceves Castañeda), the dilapidated bus becomes a raucous community on wheels—peasants, salesmen and politicians, through rivers and mountains and fog "thick as cotton." The jaunt from It Happened One Night comes with the flirt from It's a Wonderful Life, a temptress (Lilia Prado) hellbent on testing the hero's fidelity. "Eyes on the curves and lose control." In a relaxed, folksy mood, Luis Buñuel has a vision of traditional and modern Mexico as quite the festive highway. At the center is a marvelous dream sequence: The camera pulls back from the embracing couple to reveal a jungle within the whirring vehicle, the apple-peel umbilical cord connected to knitting needles atop the maternal pedestal, a grinning switcheroo of wife and vamp. (The consummation itself takes place amid a thunderous storm on the edge of the celestial abyss, for the benefit of Clouzot the following year.) One unexpected childbirth and one miniature coffin in the night (cf. Ford's The Horse Soldiers), one madre surrounded by vultures and another serenaded by tourists. The pegleg in the mud and the guiding oxen, the Buñuel menagerie. "¿Animales y personas juntos? Muy bonito." With Roberto Cobo, Manuel Dondé, Beatriz Ramos, Manuel Noriega, and Roberto Meyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |