Él
MX 1952/53, directed by Luis Buñuel, with Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Aurora Walker, 92 minutes (with English subtitles)
“He” is a cultivated, bourgeois, middle-aged, well-dressed, Catholic man, someone who fits in with society and is highly regarded by others. But in fact, he is an egocentric gentleman, a psychopath of the old Spanish school for whom women are whores or angels. His hidden side is driven by a perverted love and absolute sense of ownership. He treats his wife with the jealously of a madman, and his love shifts between masochism and sadism. But when it really matters, instead of uncovering his true side, the bourgeois Catholic world, represented by his mother-in-law and the priest, protectively stand behind him. An interesting shift of perspective defines the film: while the spectator at the start still follows events with the eyes of the husband, he distances himself in the course of the film more and more, now perceiving it from the perspective of the woman. Buñuel presents the split character of the film as both the perpetrator who reifies his victim, but then ultimately himself becoming a victim, forced to insanity by the interiorized laws of propriety that form the bars of his cage.
In this way, a film emerges on the psychopathology of bourgeois everyday life, and parallel to that a complex portrait of somebody suffering from paranoia: as Buñuel put it, “I studied him like an insect.”
Alain Bergala explores the complex work of Luis Buñuel in his most recent book.
Friday Jan. 16 | 8 pm
