Classic Movie Review: Simon of the Desert (1965)

Simon of the Desert (1965)
Directed by: Luis Buñuel.
Written by: Luis Buñuel & Julio Alejandro.
Starring: Claudio Brook (Simón), Silvia Pinal (The Devil), Enrique Álvarez Félix (Brother Matías), Hortensia Santoveña (The Mother), Francisco Reiguera (The Devil as an Old Witch), Luis Aceves Castañeda (Priest), Antonio Bravo (Priest), Enrique del Castillo (The Mutilated One).

Luis Bunuel was an atheist, who nevertheless spent much of his career making films about God and religion. For the most part, his films mock organized religion – in particular the Catholic Church – and the true believers, but he has made some films that are surprisingly sympathetic to the people who truly believe in God. Take for instance Nazarin (1958), which is about a simple man who wants to live his life according to simple, Christian principles – only to have those around him make that impossible. His 1965 short film – which wasn’t a short film by design, but because the producer ran out of money, forcing a hasty resolution to the movie after only 46 minutes – is not quite as sympathetic to its main character as Nazarin, but it isn’t as merciless as some Bunuel films could be either. If anything, Bunuel seems to pity poor Simon, and attacks his followers and the priests far more than the Holy fool himself.
 

When the film opens, we learn that Simon (Claudio Brook) has spent six years, six months and six days on top of a 10 foot high pillar – a sacrifice he has made willingly to show his devotion to God (if anyone realizes the time spent there is 666, the sign of the Devil, they don’t mention it). Now, because of a “wealthy benefactor”, Simon is being promoted – they’ve built him a 25 foot pillar to stand on. Unfortunately for Simon, no one will leave him alone. The crippled and deformed make pilgrimages to him to try and be healed – and even when Simon does perform a miracle – giving a thief back his hands – they don’t seem overly grateful to him. The priests are even worse, seeing Simon as a threat to their own practice of religion – after all, his sacrifice makes theirs look small by comparison – and he doesn’t ask for any money either.

Meanwhile, the Devil, in the form of the gorgeous Silvia Pinal, arrives and tries repeatedly to tempt Simon down off his pillar. The Devil takes on many forms to try and accomplish her goal. Eventually The Devil will give up trying to tempt Simon down, and just transport him from his desert in the 4^th Century, to modern day New York, where she places him in the middle of a nightclub, full of dancing young people. If this is a vision of hell, than as Pauline Kael noted, it’s a rather pale one. But perhaps it’s just meant to represent Simon’s idea of hell. No longer can he simply cut himself off from humanity, and stand atop a pillar by himself, with people worshipping him. Simon looks even more ridiculous in that nightclub than he did on top of that pillar.

So, what finally, are we to make of Simon? His decision to stand on a pillar as a form of sacrifice to God is both crazy, and more than a little admirable. After all, don’t we normally admire someone who puts their principles and beliefs above all other things – including worldly goods? But therein lies the problem for Simon. Is it really that admirable to deny your own life in the service of God? Isn’t it somewhat disrespectful to God to waste the life he has given you, simply standing on a pillar?

If Simon of the Desert isn’t one of Bunuel’s best films – at least to my eyes – it has more to do with the strength of his other films than weaknesses in this one. When you think of films like Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour or Tristana, than Simon of the Desert doesn’t quite seem at the same level. Would it be had Bunuel been able to make the full film he wanted to? Perhaps, but I think although Simon of the Desert is “incomplete” as it is missing scenes Bunuel wanted to film, as a film unto itself, it is a coherent whole. It may not be Bunuel’s finest film, but it’s still fascinating, funny and quite serious about its subject. Only Bunuel could make a film like this.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: Land Without Bread (1933)

Land Without Bread (1933)
Directed by:  Luis Buñuel.
Written by: Luis Buñuel and Rafael Sánchez Ventura and Pierre Unik.

How does one classify Luis Bunuel’s Land Without Bread? It is, on the surface anyway, a documentary, although it is now well known that Bunuel staged much of what he shot. Some have claimed that it is a parody of a documentary – which I guess would make Bunuel the father of “mockumentary” films, but that really isn’t the truth either. Bunuel may well have staged scenes for his camera, and he certainly exaggerates the suffering of the people in the Las Hurdes area of Spain. But he is not making this up, like Christopher Guest does. Why is the narration (for the record, I saw the version with French narration and English subtitles) so dispassionate, and matter-of-fact, even when telling of all the misery he shows. And why, if this is a documentary, is it seen as the final installment in Bunuel’s surrealist trilogy, also including Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age D’Or (1930), especially since on the surface, Bunuel’s documentary seems completely and totally serious and realistic?

Bunuel’s film really is an absurd black comedy taking on the form of a documentary. There is certainly a disconnect with the narration and what we actually see. On its surface, the documentary is much like any other documentary of its time – showing us images, while an all authoritative narrator explains what we are seeing. However, the narration is often contradictory of the images, and of itself. The film’s title for example is Land Without Bread, but while bread is scarce in Las Hurdes, it is not unheard of, as the narration says. Hell, there’s even a scene in the movie called Land Without Bread of children eating bread! Other strange examples of the narration comes when the narrator tells us that as they travel through the streets, they constantly encounter sick people – while the image the film shows us at the time is that of empty streets. Or bizarre, pointless non-sequitors like telling us that “balconies are rare in Las Hurdes”, as if balconies are a sign of prosperity. Or the infamous sequence of a little girl lying in the street, who the crew is told has been lying there for three days, and must be sick. They inform us that when they return two days later, the girl has died. The sequence is absurd – who the hell lets children die in the streets? This is blatantly contradicted later in the film, when the narration makes the outlandish claim that 3 men and 11 mules were recently killed by honeybees (really?), and the film does in fact show a mule being stung repeatedly (according to some stories, Bunuel smeared the mule with honey to get the effect he wanted). Later, when a baby dies, the film tells us that “death is a rare event” (contradicted by the absurd honey bee stat) in the village, and that everyone comes out to mourn the loss of the baby – remember these are apparently the same people who let a young girl die alone in the streets.

The most telling example is perhaps the film’s most famous sequence, detailing how meat is rare, and the only time people get to eat goat meat is when one dies accidentally – the film then shows a goat falling off a mountain. Now, unless Bunuel was remarkably fortunate to catch a goat falling off a mountain at precisely when he tried to film a goat falling off a mountain, this has got to be a big tip off that the documentary isn’t really to be trusted. And, in fact, it is now well known that the crew shot the goat, and then threw it off the mountain. But even if all this would be fairly obvious by itself, Bunuel makes it more obvious. He actually has not one, but two shots of the goat falling, from different angles. Now how do you suppose he got that?

The music is another clue that everything is not as it seems. Since the film was released, people have complained that the music doesn’t match the images – but those are the people who take the movie at face value. The music, of course, is entirely inappropriate to what they show. Brahms’ romantic Symphony No. 4, in used, which makes no sense to what we see. You either have to assume that Bunuel was tone deaf to what kind of music to use in a film, or that he is subverting the entire endeavor by picking the most absurd music possible for use in his film.

So what then is Land Without Bread? Does it mock the people of Las Hurdes, who although they are not as bad off as Bunuel portrays them, certainly was then a place that was forgotten by the government, and was desperately poor? Even now, 80 years later, many people of Las Hurdes resent Bunuel’s portrayal of them, as people still think they are some sort of backwater, Spanish hillbillies. But Bunuel doesn’t really mock them he mocks the audience who takes everything that he is saying – even the most absurd things – at face value. He mocks them for being naïve, and not thinking critically about what they are seeing.  And he mocks the whole patronizing genre of documentary that thrusts a camera in the face of “forgotten” people, to let the audience both feel pity for the people in the documentary, and at the same time superior to them. He is also, of course, mocking the Catholic Church (Land Without Bread could very easily be called Land Without God, since bread does play a fairly central role in the Catholic Church).

Whatever you define Land Without Bread as being – and I’ve heard it called a mockumentary, a documentary and a surreal documentary among many, many other things – to me it is undeniably a masterwork by Bunuel. The film clocks in at under 30 minutes in length, but packs so much absurdity, dark comedy, surrealism, and also – it must be said – tragic imagery – into its running time that it boggles the mind. Bunuel was a genius – one of the greatest filmmakers in history. And Land Without Bread, while lesser known than either Un Chien Andalou or L’Age D’Or, to me is the greatest achievement of Bunuel’s early films.

The Best Films I've Never Seen Before: El (1953)

El (1953) *** ½
Directed by: Luis Bunuel.
Written by: Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza based on the novel by Mercedes Pinto.
Starring: Arturo de Córdova (Francisco Galvan de Montemayor), Delia Garcés (Gloria Milalta), Luis Beristáin (Raul Conde), Aurora Walker (Esperanza Peralta), Carlos Martínez Baena (Padre Velasco), Manuel Dondé (Pablo), Rafael Banquells (Ricardo Luján), Fernando Casanova (Beltrán).

Earlier in this series, when I wrote about Luis Bunuel’s Los Olivados, I spoke of how different that film – with its gritty realism – was from most of Bunuel’s more famous films, which embraced surrealism, and were in effect dark comedies about sexual desire, and the ridiculousness of it all. His film El, made just a few short years after Los Olivados, is more in line with his more famous later films – you could even say that it is almost like a dry run from films such as Viridiana (1961), Tristania (1970) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). But while those films, despite their dark subject matter, could be described as dark comedies, where Bunuel pokes fun at the religious restrictions of society, and the ridiculousness of sexual desire that we are impossible to control, El tells a similar story but takes it much more seriously. Personally, I prefer the more playful Bunuel, but this film has it merits as well.

The movie tells the story of Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Cordova), a respectable man of about 40, who comes from money and is deeply admired in his community. When he first catches a glimpse of Gloria Milalta (Delia Garces), he falls immediately in love with her – and sets out to possess her completely. He doesn’t care that she is already engaged – to a friend of his no less – he becomes obsessed with her. With her fiancé out of town on an extended business trip, Francisco makes his move, and quickly wins Gloria over with his charms. But it is not long into their marriage before she regrets her decision. Francisco is jealous and possessive beyond all normal means – he keeps her hidden away in his large house, and questions her about her sexual past (in the process revealing that he was a virgin before meeting her). He grows insane with rage every time she even talks to another man. She reaches out for help – but her mother, their priest and everyone else seemingly doesn’t believe her. She is just a young, naïve woman, and doesn’t understand men they tell her. It is natural for him to be jealous. But no one knows the extent of his cruelty.

Bunuel was always a great visual filmmaker, and there are sequences in El that are unforgettable. In particular there is a scene where Francisco takes Gloria to the top of a bell tower, which will remind many viewers of a similar scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, made five years later. Hitchcock was addressing different sexual obsessions in his masterpiece, but it is quite clear that El served as a inspiration for him in making what I think is his best film.

The final scene in El is also quite haunting. It appears that Francisco has finally found some peace in his life – but that peace is really just a façade, and in the films haunting final shot, it is clear that he really hasn’t found peace at all. He is still obsessed with the same things. He never seems to realize that he had what he wanted – and that he is the one that blew it, not Gloria at all.

Watching El after seeing Bunuel’s later films that addressed similar issues, I cannot help but think that the film isn’t quite up to their level. Those later films though were masterpieces, and while I wouldn’t say that about El, I would definitely say that it is a near great film – and a must for all Bunuel fans.