by ·Comments Off on El (1953, Luis Buñuel)

Mustache Man/Land Baron Francisco spots hot girl Gloria during foot-fetish church and chases her relentlessly, firing everyone in his path, breaking up her engagement with construction guy Raul, winning the girl through sheer force.

Soon he’s going off on Gloria in jealous rages, while fighting for some property he claims was stolen from his ancestors. When they meet hunky Ricardo on their honeymoon he goes insane and attacks the guy. Back home, he gets a conspiracy against his wife between her mother and servant and priest, then shoots her with blanks as a threat to stop talking. She finds Raul and flashbacks half the movie, while Francisco finally loses his mind completely in public.

I’m surprised Bunuel worked with this cinematographer again – he appears to have lit the scenes with a searchlight positioned behind the camera, so everyone has a shadow right behind them. Also surprised the letterboxd crowd hasn’t declared this and The River and Death and Archibaldo de la Cruz a trilogy since Carlos Baena plays priests in all three. Don F is best known for The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, Gloria was an Argentine film star, and the servant was a work boss in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

by ·Comments Off on The River and Death (1955, Luis Buñuel)

Simple fable of a violent vendetta town cluttered up with twenty characters and a flashback structure so it seems more complex than it is. Hunky doctor Gerardo, recovering from polio in the big city, is being challenged by Romulo to a duel back in his hometown. He explains that the men of his family and another have been killing each other for generations, each killer hiding out on a nearby island for a penance period afterwards. Gerardo goes home at his mom’s request, agrees to meet Romulo on the island but refuses to shoot him – an anti-macho softie ending as the two men hug it out.

Romulo is Friday in the Robinson Crusoe movie, the town priest also played priests in Archibaldo de la Cruz and El, and peacekeeping elder Don Nemesio plays the title role in the as-seen-on-MST3K Santa Claus.

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2023, Lisandro Alonso)

Viggo Mortensen is searching for his missing daughter again, this time as a killer in a b/w Western. Presumably this is a prank on those of us who wanted another Jauja, because after a half hour Viggo’s movie is shrunk down to an SD TV movie and ignored like Danny Glover in Bamako, and instead we follow a Native American cop on her rounds, and then… I think her niece gets transported by a CG stork into a dream-recounting ceremony where a young man stabs somebody then tries to escape.

Shot:

Reverse shot:

“Each story explores questions of indigeneity and its reaction or resistance to the imposition of Western law and order” – Jeff Reichert works through the cinema/myth/dream journey on Reverse Shot, and Alonso has no fucks to give in his Cinema Scope interview.

From Bamako to Dead Man:

by ·Comments Off on Lost in the Night (2023, Amat Escalante)

Not a great title, I keep forgetting which movie this was. It’s more like Mexican Parasite – Emiliano (Robe of Gems) is searching for his disappeared activist mom and after a tip from a dying cop he gets a job with a rich social-media-artist family, and hangs out with their daughter while things fall apart between a local religious cult and the cartels and the family’s own secrets and greed.

by ·Comments Off on Lone Star (1996, John Sayles)

A high-quality modern Western drama, solid cast and writing, with a couple of elevating factors. The stylistic trick of transitioning into flashbacks with a camera move instead of an edit or fade, past characters sharing physical space with the present, is impressive every time. And just when the story is wrapping up, when Chris Cooper learns that his late father Matthew McConaughey did not shoot the sheriff, he also learns that his old flame newly re-enflamed (Elizabeth Peña) is his half-sister… and they decide they can live with that.

Bad Sheriff Kristofferson’s final act:

Bar owner Otis later played a detective in The Empty Man. His estranged military son Joe Morton was the doomed robotics inventor in Terminator 2. Peña was in The Second Civil War, which it’s probably time to rewatch. Nominated for a bunch of awards that Fargo won, so it’s good to see key Coen critic Adam Nayman defending.

Its qualities of thoughtful, hard-edged sociological storytelling and analysis are currently in short supply. They don’t make ’em like this anymore … For all its skepticism about the American tendency to mythologize (and mass market) its sins away, the film is tender about the necessity of forgetting, or at least trying to. It’s a measure of Sayles’s superlative construction that a story that begins with something being unearthed ends with a plea to keep another secret buried — and of his empathy as an artist that the sentiment rings true.

Sisters Lovers:

Coen Connection:

by ·Comments Off on Daughter of Deceit (1951, Luis Bunuel)

New York is getting a Buñuel In Mexico retrospective. I wish them luck – I prefer to space these out, though after Death in the Garden and Nazarin this one’s my third of the year.

Quintin is Fernando Soler of Susana, walks out on his family after he catches his wife cheating and she hollers that their daughter isn’t his. Pretty good 20-year edit while the camera’s in a pantry, now the wife is dying and wants Q to know she was lying, while Q is off being a dangerous asshole club boss. Their daughter Marta has been raised by an abusive stepdad, she runs off to the city with her man Paco (Rubén Rojo of Brainiac), immediately runs into her dad who decides to kill Paco for some minor slight. It all gets cleared up in time, nobody dies except probably the mom, and Q is forgiven for some reason. MVPs are Q’s comic henchmen smarter than their boss: Angelito (Fernando Soto, Lupita’s brother in Illusions Travel by Streetcar) and Home Run.

Q, Angelito, Home Run, Stepdad (Roberto Meyer of at least ten Buñuels):

Happy young couple:

Q explains his philosophy:

by ·Comments Off on Fausto (2018, Andrea Bussmann)

It’s time once again for Locorazo, a home viewing series of films that played the Locarno Festival five years ago. This one played in the “Filmmakers of the Present” section for first and second features – in this case it’s her first solo feature, the previous two being collaborations with her husband Nicolas Pereda (Fauna), who only assists on this one (plus thanks in the credits to Joshua Bonnetta and Matias Pineiro).

Stories about lingering ghosts and missing shadows, a witch, psychic animals and astronomical events, told at night, often via narrator. “We live in a conscious universe, we just do not realize it.”

Dudes hanging out smoking, usually at night. The subjects of the stories are sometimes seen at an indifferent distance from the camera. A few unique visual moments: a text list of animals that can see better at night, a beach shot with an absurdly low horizon line.

The director in Mubi:

The concept of the search and searching was a central idea in the film and in the Faust myth. Much of the time we learn the characters are searching for a shadow, a man, et cetera. The theme of the search was something important for me to use, but also important to continue without a resolution. Faust, after all, wants nothing more than to unlock the keys to the universe and himself—something that, like Faust, we are far from doing. I’m never looking for a particular thing, but I’m always in the process of searching and exploring. I’m consumed by questions, which through the seeking of answer continually opens up new questions.

by ·Comments Off on Death in the Garden (1956, Luis Buñuel)

Buñuel’s least-well dubbed movie, filmed in Mexico and spoken in French. Diamond miners and soldiers are having a showdown when a mysterious stranger wanders into town, but instead of impressing everyone with his skills a la Yojimbo he’s an asshole to everyone – this is Shark (That is the Dawn‘s doctor Georges Marchal), who needs a place to stay so he shacks up with prostitute Simone Signoret, who is beloved of miner Castin (Clouzot regular Charles Vanel).

The miners-vs-soldiers war reaches a climax in a midnight firing squad which leads to a riot. Our heroes escape (with fake priest Michel Piccoli and a mute girl: Michèle Girardon of the earliest Rohmers), getting very lost in the jungle, walking in circles. They reach the promised land, finding a crashed plane full of food and jewels along the way, rescued and rich, but Castin goes mad, throwing his diamonds in the lake and murdering everyone.

Larsen:

Politically the movie may side with the miners, but once this crew forms and heads into the jungle, Buñuel is more interested in exploring the hypocrisies that exist in every human heart. And so the priest is a fraud, the prostitute is an opportunist, and the miner loses his mind … Death in the Garden concludes with a more subversive poetic image: two figures blithely paddling across a South American lake as if they were in a Venetian gondola, when in fact a literal and spiritual wilderness surrounds them.

by ·Comments Off on Nazarin (1959, Luis Buñuel)

About time I rewatched this. Francisco Rabal is our priest (also a monk in The Nun), and the prostitute who ruins him when he takes her in after a bloody fight is Rita Macedo of Archibaldo de la Cruz. He and Beatriz (Marga López, star of a couple Taboada movies) take a pilgrimage (aka get the hell out of town before the law catches them) and keep running into the same old people from town. Beatriz’s sinister man Pinto finds her, dwarf Ujo (Simon of the Desert‘s Jesús Fernández in his first Bunuel film) follows Andara around. I’m sure there are Bunuelian themes of repetition without escape, and of the truly religious vs. common churchgoers (and the absurdity of both).