Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953)

In 1953, Luis Buñuel’s career as a filmmaker was restarting with increased freedom and initiative in México. After the European success of Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel adapted with his usual accomplice and partner Luis Alcoriza the novel Él (1926) by Mercedes Pinto, which rather than a fiction was a detailed chronicle of her nightmarish ordeal as the victim of an over-jealous megalomaniac husband who was, in fact, a severe case of delirious paranoia (Lacan showed this film to his psychiatry students as a good example of the mental desorder).

Magnificently played by Arturo de Córdova, Francisco Galván is what in Spain is called a meapilas, a very churchy ‘good and pure Christian gentleman’, but in fact a middle-aged virgin. Obsessed by the shod feet of another churchgoer, Gloria (Delia Garcés), he pursues her until she breaks with her fiancé and finally marries him instead, astonishingly fascinated by his domineering character. But even on the honeymoon she starts to discover and suffer his wholly unjustified jealousy and his maniac interpretation of everything as mocking gestures, as proofs of her unfaithfulness or of conspiracies against himself and his financial and property interests. He mistrusts his own wife, his lawyers and almost everybody, despises humans, whom he sees as vermin, and megalomaniacally claims that if he were God, he would never forgive mankind.

Although usually Luis Buñuel was a great humourist as well as a permanent surrealist, this – a bit like Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man – is probably one of his most serious films, and also one of the most complex and more tensely and elliptically narrated, closing with one of the most disquieting final shots ever filmed. Considered by many as the best of Buñuel’s masterpieces together with The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and The Exterminating Angel, it contains some images that make one wonder if Hitchcock had watched and recalled Él when he was filming Vertigo five years later.

Catálogo de “Il Cinema Ritrovato” (2022)