Defining Favourites: Él (1953)
Luis Buñuel's melodrama breaks apart the barriers between class in Mexico.
Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another — akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Screenplay by Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, from the novel Pensamientos by Mercedes Pinto
Produced by Óscar Dancigers
Starring Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Luis Beristáin
Premiere Date: July 9, 1953
Running Time: 92 minutes
Él, which simply means “him” in Spanish, feels like an appropriate title for a melodrama about sexual frustrations, or the general imbalance that comes forth between men and women. As told by one of cinema’s great Surrealists, it’s hard not to be caught by how Luis Buñuel’s heightened realities reflect his attitudes towards the Catholic Church and its corrupting influence on the world. Yet, this has always been one of Buñuel’s most distinctive trademarks. It tells you all about how he views a means of finding solace in a cruel world as another method of normalizing cruelty – which may be the perfect pretext for a film about love that grows into immense jealousy. The all-encompassing title is only made to feel more fitting here: because Él is about the people who carry the most power in our lives, and they come in many forms.
In Buñuel’s film, “Él” refers to Francisco Galvan de Montemayor, the bourgeois patriarch married to Gloria Milalta. Francisco almost feels like a godlike figure, especially down to the fact that the title Él is quite literally the pronoun “he.” Yet, this film is one that is built entirely around jealousy, especially when one may see “él” as being someone on top of the world. The paranoia doesn’t simply come at random, it’s felt in how people of the upper class can sense that their power is being threatened even in the slightest manner. From there on, Buñuel finds that we really dig into the hearts of those who have amassed incredible wealth; especially when they have amassed the support from an institution nearly as influential as the Catholic Church. Everything we’re seeing here unfolds within a context of a marriage, but the scope upon which Buñuel takes forth is one that seeks to hold such institutions accountable for their corruption of the human soul.
