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Bowery Boys and Pinturas Negras, Luis Buñuel's lower depths. The Forgotten Ones are a gang of street urchins in Mexico City, slum-dwelling juveniles devouring each other in the early stages of life's animalistic struggle. Living in the rubble, they pantomime bullfights, mug passersby for cigarettes, and surround a blind musician (Miguel Inclán) who wields a mean stick, rusty nail and all. (As the bloodied, splenetic beggar strains to lift himself off the ground, the camera pans left to reveal a chortling chicken.) The doomed friends from De Sica's Shoeshine are here a sensitive little scrounger (Alfonso Mejía) and a loutish reformatory runaway (Roberto Cobo), united by crime and by different kinds of desire toward Mejía's mother (Estela Inda). The city is merely a thin layer of pavement over the blistered desert, the carnival carousel is a wheel of pain to the despondent tykes operating it, the unfinished building at a construction site is a tower's steel skeleton left exposed. Adults meanwhile have only head-shaking platitudes to offer: "I wish we could lock up poverty instead of people." Not a reformist pamphlet but an ultra-lucid horror show, an unrelenting subversion of neo-realist tropes, an egg thrown in the eye of the voyeuristic camera searching for tidy misery. Not even the unconscious can be an escape when the poor impotently prey on the poor, the boy's dream (grinning corpse, feathers, floating mother and raw beef) is Lorca's "confin de carne y sueño," surely. A donkey stares through a window following a murder, the sightless neighborhood sage is a reactionary molester while the most despicable character gets a tenderly epiphanic death—the revulsion and pity of Buñuel's gaze pull together the feverish menagerie of bodies and critters, where children must learn to survive or are literally tossed into the garbage dump. Rocha, Peckinpah, Ripstein and Babenco are who these kids grow up into. Cinematography by Gabriel Figueroa. With Mário Ramírez, Alma Delia Fuentes, Francisco Jambrina, Jesús Navarro, Efraín Arauz, and Javier Amézcua. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |