Susana Director: Luis Buñuel
Year: 1950
Genre: Melodrama
Country: Mexico
Duration: 82 minutes
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jaime Salvador, Rodolfo Usigli (based on a story by Manuel Reachi)
Music: Raúl Lavista
Photo: José Ortiz Ramos
Cast: Fernando Soler, Rosita Quintana, Víctor Manuel Mendoza, Matilde Palou
Producer: International Film
ostracized in the United States for being a communist and atheist, Luis Buñuel had no choice but to travel to Mexico to make the beans in the world of cinema. But, indeed, with almost fifty years behind his film resume was rather limited: a short film ("Un Chien Andalou"), a long ("The Golden Age"), a documentary ("The Hurdes: earth without bread ") and you stop counting. Yes, Buñuel had all the fame and provocative surrealist genius, but for a producer that was the same as not having anything. And for more matters worse, the first film he made in Mexico, "Gran Casino" was a box office flop. Buñuel was when the producers realized that other language spoken. For Buñuel film was art, feelings and aesthetic provocation. For a film producer was a business, money spent to raise much more money. So easy. Buñuel did not waste the second chance he had with his next album, "Big Skull", and won the reputation as a fast and efficient director. Thus was born the best part of the film by Luis Bunuel, a film constrained by the formal conditions of the industry Mexican film but with multiple levels of reading, wasting surrealism and covertly provocative and subversive.
The argument of "Susana" can not be more conventional and melodramatic: a-con escapes from prison and is pretending to be helpless orphan for a family of tycoons to adopt it and make it work on the farm. The problem is that the girl is very nice weekend and got all the lunatics farm men lost, including the father (Fernando Soler) and son. Susan uses this power to control the family and take his job and the holy wife. Finally, a soap opera with all the law certainly go down in history unnoticed if not for Buñuel and his evil arts.
The film starts off as overly harsh and torn: we see the punishment cell where he is detained Susana, filled with all sorts of bugs and nasty little creatures. Susan is the typical bad soap opera, more bad pain unscrupulous, but Buñuel want to overdo the topic further to cause more laughter than shock. In addition, Buñuel take this time to show blasphemous and atheistic vision of reality, not without irony and with a clear spirit of joke (always present in all his films)
The scene is just great investment because it is a caustic of traditional values \u200b\u200bin fiction, god, rather than releasing an innocent unjustly convicted, released at a guilty without scruples. Other critics have pointed out that this scene is a critique of Buñuel to inhumane prison system in place for reform, harm to the inmate. Well, why not? But to me that what I wanted Buñuel was laughing a bit of a topical situation and give it a blasphemous twist (in a masterly manner, I would say). In the next scene, Buñuel inks reloaded parodie exaggerating the evil influence of Susanna: she is not only a criminal but is evil incarnate, the devil himself, the source of all evil in the house.
The "peace" of the household, consisting of the routine and the comfort of the predictable, is altered by uncontrolled passions long dormant. The head of the family feels a sexual attraction for his protege, who does not feel attraction for his wife, and for a moment you feel uncomfortable in his role as "husband and husband." Want to live, want to take off the yoke of maintaining a traditional family, and ultimately has a carnal approach to Susan. And when his saintly wife finds out, has a very restrained response ...
Buñuel
reverse roles again in this scene offering the viewer a trick question who is more wicked and hypocritical of them? Does the criminal or the good Christian who enjoys hitting at almost sexual whipping a sinner? In addition, Buñuel does engage the viewer caning on two levels: first, makes the viewer identify with the sainted wife, "good official" film that has suffered the evil arts of Susan, but on the other side and maybe as the camera focuses, the viewer is Susan, is being buffeted by the lady, perhaps as punishment for sharing the pleasure of the whip. Although the underlying idea that the main reason is that Susan scourge has slept with her husband (and also with his son and the foreman), but the girl will take his place (and economic status) in the family hierarchy. Moreover, the attitude of the holy cockney wife reminds me of the way it was Miguel de Cervantes to portray the aristocracy as it is in fact: all the manners and affectations disappear at any time to behave the same way boorish and vulgar that "the common people."
Finally, the traditional family, one of the most archaic and damaging institutions of human beings, designed ultimately for economic reasons is based on hypocritical and unrealistic standards often tend to blow at the slightest external or internal stimulus. With "Susana", Buñuel shows the implicit falsity of this institution, through a seemingly trite plot but rich in substance and especially in the form. However, as pointed out by the end of the Buñuel film, the main virtue of the traditional family, the hypocrisy is what keeps it alive and, coupled with selective forgetting, allowing business as usual ...
other words, we become fools in order to maintain the bar. Well, so does the world right? And poor Susan, sly but sincere in his passions and desires, he has no one to rot in a cell with their stupid, and vermin. Is the price you pay for trying to confront the traditional family.
Lastly, one of those great scenes, lucid and very cruel Buñuel, where the director shows the horrible nature of the company established in this case, the machismo.
"Susana" by Luis Buñuel, a classic of Mexican cinema (and universal) to discover.
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