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Thornton Wilder has the theme in Heaven's My Destination, Luis Buñuel shoots it soberly to best contrast it with the joke version (Simon of the Desert). Beaten by prisoners and jeered by prostitutes, the apostolic priest (Francisco Rabal) in rural Mexico, "un grandissimo tonto" to flophouse dwellers. He's robbed of everything yet has no use for locks, in staggers the streetwalker (Rita Macedo) with murder in her conscience, her sister the suicidal epileptic (Marga López) meanwhile writhes in the street. (One's delirious vision of a chortling Christ is stitched to the other's carnal recollection, a rough lover's lip bitten bloody.) After scandal spreads, he ditches cassock for rags and hits the road with the women behind him. "Be saintly on your own" is the grouchy guidance, ahead are ailing children and pestilent villages. Out in the wilderness, between Voltaire and Bernanos, Buñuel's search for illumination: "Can't even buy candles, how could I afford electricity?" In the collision of pious intentions and the sordid world, Christian deeds are suggestively derailed. The padre turned away at the construction site is filmed like a memory of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, a couple of faint gunshots state the ensuing riot. A bedridden woman is offered last rites, though all she longs for is her beloved's embrace. Coolly proud of his humility, the protagonist himself has much to learn about compassion: When the disconsolate López rests her head on his shoulder, he turns his gaze to the snail slithering on his hand. (By comparison, the dwarf who declares his feelings for Macedo embodies the most direct love.) A work of "inner and outer wounds," in which the epiphany that unsettles and frees comes in the shape of a pineapple, like Lorca's pomegranate. Rossellini (The Flowers of St. Francis) and Bergman (Winter Light) have their variations. With Ignacio López Tarso, Ofelia Guilmáin, Noé Murayama, and Jesús Fernández. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |