Francisco, a rich, middle-aged virgin, obsessive about regaining possession of once-upon-a-time household property, turns the pressure of his pathology on Gloria. He efficiently woos her away from her fiancé and, beginning on their marriage ceremony evening, makes her life a dwelling hell. Oscillating between insane jealousy and abject apologies (however ever aroused by the sight of her toes), he turns into more and more abusive, mentally and bodily. At one level, anticipating the climax of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he finagles her to the highest of a mission bell tower and, abruptly enraged, tries to throw her off.
All through, the madman is protected by his wealth, defended by the Catholic Church and even by Gloria’s mom. “Él” has been taken as a parody of machismo, however it’s extra pointedly an assault on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability. Behind the stone facade of Francisco’s colonial mansion lies a litter of chandeliers, tchotchkes and Jugendstil-patterned portals. Tailored from a quasi-autobiographical novel by the Spanish author Mercedes Pinto, “Él” was additional knowledgeable by the antics of Buñuel’s brother-in-law and, he’s instructed, his personal goals.
Arriving in Cannes two years after Buñuel’s triumphant comeback with the anti-neorealist slum drama “Los Olvidados,” “Él” was dismissed by many, together with the jury president, Jean Cocteau, as a industrial sellout. The unimpressed New York Instances reviewer, A.H. Weiler, termed the movie “an elementary and uninspired examine of irregular psychology.” (Nonetheless, no much less an authority than Jacques Lacan thought of “Él” to be exemplary, and the educated French critic Georges Sadoul acknowledged the movie as an replace of “L’Age d’Or,” the 1930 Buñuel-Dalí collaboration that incited a riot.)
“Él” is so blandly outrageous that it’s straightforward to go over its affronts. One evening, Francisco seems with cotton gauze, scissors, a needle and thread and a few heavy rope, hovering over his sleeping spouse. To think about his plan is to turn into implicated in his craziness. Inevitably, Francisco’s closing break with actuality happens in the identical church the place the film opens (and features a bodily assault on his household priest).
A coda reveals Francisco dwelling in a monastery. “Religion has turn into his defend towards the world,” a brother explains. Having begun by figuring out non secular ritual with fetishism, “Él” concludes by equating devotion and paranoia. The revelations of the jolting postscript are all of the extra highly effective if one is aware of that the cowled determine within the final shot is the director himself.
Él
By way of March 20, Movie Discussion board, Manhattan, filmforum.org.
