El. 1952. Directed by Luis Bunuel.

(1/1/01)

El is a Bunuel delight. It is consistently entertaining. Arturo de Cordova has a field day as the jealous husband. Delia Garces seems rather colorless as the wife, but she is really playing straight man to Cordova.

It begins with a scene that really made me uncomfortable. It is in church and a priest is going through the ritual of washing (and I think even kissing) the feet of young boys. It is an image of perverted sexuality satisfied by religious ritual.

The eyes of a man, Francisco, stray from this spectacle to look at a row of women's feet. And in this row of women he finds one that he likes and that he pursues. Her name is Gloria and she is engaged to a friend of his, but he prevails and they marry.

Once they are married he becomes insanely jealous, with an emphasis on the words insane. He imagines ridiculous things about his wife and makes her life a living hell. What happens is both comic and horrifying.

Because Francisco is a well-respected man he is unvaryingly upheld as being in the right. When he insists that the man in the next room in the hotel has been chasing Gloria and picks a fight with him it is the other man who is asked to leave. Gloria goes to talk first to her mother and then to the priest. In both cases Francisco has beaten her to them, his account of the problem has been accepted and Gloria finds herself viewed as being in the wrong. She is not being a good wife.

The fact that he is a man gives him a big advantage. This is prefigured earlier in the film when the valet harrasses the maid and it is the maid who is dismissed. This is a patriarchal culture and men have the status.

Things come to a head in church. Where else? Francisco (I think) follows Gloria or a woman he mistakes for her into church. (I forget exactlywhat happens.) He imagines that every one is laughing at him. This scene is a tour de force. The film cuts back and forth from what Francisco imagines--everyone laughing and pointing fingers and making horn gestures at him--to reality. It is accenuated by freeze-frames. Finally, in his madness, he attacks the priest on the altar. Even Francisco can't get away with that.

At the end Francisco is living quietly in a monastery. Gloria has gone back to her former fiance, Raul. In the last shot Francisco walks a zigzag path. It is like the Catholic Church has claimed him. His real life has been taken away from him.

The Church is blamed, I believe, for francisco's problems. He has never had sex before his somewhat late marriage, probably in an attempt to live up to the morals he has been taught. His sexuality has been repressed and it can no longer function normally. Thus, the only place for him is a monastery.

I want to mention two other interesting moments. Francisco shoots Gloria with a gun and she falls. In the next scene we learn that the gun was filled with blanks and he was only trying to scare her. The other one is when he takes her to a bell tower in a church or mission and appears to try to throw her off. When she runs from him he tells her that he was only kidding.