Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
El (This Strange Passion) was directed by Spain’s most renowned director, Luis Buñuel during his prolific Mexican period, though precious little about the film is Mexican. Instead, this is a film about psychological torments of a kind that can spring up in any time or place. The general style of the film resembles the suspense dramas of Alfred Hitchcock, who was, in fact, influenced to an extent by Buñuel’s work.
The Story: The film opens with a religious ceremony in a Spanish Cathedral. Father Velasco (Carlos Martínez Baena) washes and kisses the feet of each altar boy in succession, while his lifelong friend Don Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Córdova) solemnly carries the pan of water. Francisco’s mind is wandering a bit as he examines the series of bare feet and then a row of shod feet behind. Suddenly, he spies a pair of perfect feet that particularly spark his interest. His gaze glides upward to the lovely face of Gloria (Delia Garcés). The poor man is thunderstruck. This is the woman he must have.
After the religious ceremony, the young lady disappears before Francisco can learn her name. Francisco returns to the church daily hoping to see his angel and is rewarded, one day, by her presence in the same seat where he had earlier spied her lovely feet. He professes his rapture for her, but again she begs to be excused without providing even her name. Francisco follows her car in a taxi and soon observes her meeting her fiancée, Raul (Luis Beristáin), at a restaurant. Francisco is acquainted with Raul, who works in the construction industry, building dams.
Francisco pays Raul a visit at his place of work as if to renew an old acquaintance. He invites Raul to come to dinner. When Raul begs off, saying he has promised to go out with his fiancée and her mother, Francisco invites them to come along as well. Francisco has skillfully devised a circumstance that will bring him into proximity to Gloria where he hopes their natural chemistry will have its way.
At the dinner party, Francisco takes every feasible opportunity to press his attentions on Gloria. During dinner, the discussion turns to love – Raul and Gloria’s engagement leads naturally to the question of when Francisco will find a love interest. Francisco expounds on the superiority and purity of love-at-first-sight: “A man walks past a thousand women, then suddenly meets one – that instinctive one! She fulfills the dream, answers the longing.” One of the dinner guests disagrees, likening that kind of love to a poisoned arrow. Later, Francisco is able to get Gloria alone in the garden – they kiss . . . and the hawk has his sparrow.
The film now jumps ahead several months or a few years. An agitated Gloria is almost running along a walk, steps out into a street, and is nearly struck by a vehicle. The driver turns out to be Raul. It’s been a long time since they’ve seen one another. He offers her a ride and she finally accepts. She has so much to tell him. We now see in a series of flashbacks that her married life with Francisco has been one endless nightmare. Francisco’s jealousy is beyond all bounds and rationality. It began on their wedding night. As Gloria lay peacefully prepared to receive Francisco’s first marital kiss, he suddenly asked her what she was thinking. She replied, credibly, that she was thinking of him. Francisco accused her of lying and that she was actually thinking about Raul! He ended up sleeping by himself on the couch.
Later, during their honeymoon trip, they had encountered an acquaintance of Gloria, someone she had merely met once or twice. Soon, Francisco had convinced himself that the man was following them and trying to seduce Gloria. When Francisco discovered that the man had the adjacent room, he accused the man of spying on them through a keyhole and got into fisticuffs with the man. Back at home, it was more of the same. Francisco even shot Gloria with a handgun – though it turned out to be loaded only with blanks. She fainted and was actually amazed when she came to that she was not already dead.
Francisco’s standing in the community is such that Gloria can get no satisfaction or understanding when she seeks help. She wants to stand by her man and get help not only for herself but for him, but her viewpoint is dismissed. Her own mother is charmed by Francisco and only offers that Gloria needs to accept that her husband’s jealousy reflects his love. Father Velasco, who has known Francisco from childhood, dismisses Gloria’s concerns as an overwrought imagination. Raul’s was the first sympathetic ear that Gloria had encountered.
THE NEXT THREE PARAGRAPHS HAVE A SUCCESSION OF SPOILERS. SKIP TO THEMES IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE MOVIE.
Francisco’s delusions and aberrant behavior escalates. We see him, one night, preparing needle, thread, and ropes. He intends to tie Gloria to her bed as she sleeps and [I can barely type it] stitch her vagina closed. She awakens and her screams draw the attention of the servants and send Francisco scurrying to his room in confusion. On another occasion, Francisco suggests a quiet afternoon of recreation together. He rejects the racetrack because there will be too many people. Instead, he takes her to the top of a bell tower. He comments on how all of the people on the streets below look like worms and how he would like to crush them. He suddenly starts to strangle Gloria and speculates on how easily he could throw her off the tower so that she would splatter on the street below. She manages to get out of his grasp and escape down the bell tower’s spiral staircase.
By the time Francisco gets back to their home, Gloria is gone. He takes his handgun from its drawer and places it in his coat pocket. He frantically searches for Gloria – at her mother’s home, at Raul’s apartment, but she’s not to be found. He thinks he spots her in a passing car and later walking with a man – into the church where they first met. He runs into the church. Mass is underway. The woman he is following looks a bit like Gloria but it is not her. Francisco imagines the members of the parish, the altar boys, even his dear old friend Father Velasco laughing at him, mocking him. He races up onto the altar and attacks Father Velasco but is quickly subdued.
The film now jumps ahead a decade or so. Gloria is married to Raul and they have a son of perhaps 8-10 years of age. They’ve named him Francisco [though I can’t imagine why]. They happen to be in the area and have stopped by the monastery to find out how Gloria’s former husband is doing. Francisco found his peace in religion. Later the priest with whom they spoke encounters Francisco, decked out in a friar’s robe. Francisco has seen the visitors and learns that they are married. “See”, he says, “I guess I wasn’t so far off all along.”
END SPOILERS
Themes:El is obviously a portrait of a demented man but what kind of mental health problem is this? There’s a lot of misconceptions among reviewers about Don Francisco’s condition. This is not a depiction of an obsession, it’s not simple paranoia, it’s not a personality disorder brought on by a hyper-religious upbringing, and its certainly not mainly runaway Spanish machismo, each of which has been suggested by one reviewer or another. Clinically, Don Francisco’s condition (in its early stage) would be diagnosed as Delusional Disorder of the Jealous Type. The best way to think of Delusional Disorder in relation to other psychoses is that it is a kind of partial psychosis, affecting only one particular aspect of the person’s personality. People who know the individual in a context in which the abnormal aspect of the person’s psyche is not evident might not even know that the person has a mental disorder. For example, if the Delusional Disorder is the Jealous Type, people who know the individual in the work place, where the spouse is not present, might not perceive any abnormality in the individual at all. In that regard, it is interesting that Father Velasco was deceived, telling Gloria, “My child, I’ve known Francisco all his life. He holds no secrets from me.” Later, Francisco’s mental disorder advances to outright Schizophrenia. Paranoid elements begin to come into play as the film progresses (“My opponents will stop at nothing to destroy me!”) as well as bizarre ideation and outbursts of hostility.
(In case you're interested, the other four types of delusional disorder are the erotomanic type (belief that one is loved by a famous person or would be loved if one can simply get their attention), grandiose type (inflated sense of worth, power, or status), the persecutory type (suspecting that people are out to get you), and the somatic type (believing that one has one or more ailments for which there is no evidence). Delusional Disorder responds to the same medications as schizophrenia; namely, Antipsychotic Drugs.)
According to the highly-regarded critic Pauline Kael, Buñuel’s subject matter in this film is Spanish machismo. She argues that “by carrying the Spanish male’s obsession with female chastity to paranoia, he exposes the insanity that’s inherent in it.” As much as I admire Pauline Kael’s insightfulness, I’m think she’s off track on this occasion. First, this film has almost nothing to do with female chastity, a concept that has little meaning in relation to a married woman. This is a film about jealousy, paranoia, and perceived unfaithfulness. Secondly, while it is true that exaggerating a phenomenon is sometimes a valid method for exploring its implications, this film is dealing with a psychopathological disorder – delusional disorder progressing to outright schizophrenia – which is not in any sense an exaggeration of machismo, perversion, or preoccupation with chastity. It would be analogous to trying to illuminate the “reserved nature” of Norwegians by creating a Norwegian character with major depression. Or, studying the aggressive character of the German people by creating a fictional German psychopathic killer. Exaggeration is one thing, but here we are dealing instead with completely aberrant psychology. A generalization cannot be effectively established from an isolated aberrant instance. When films have ambiguous themes (some of the best films have this quality intentionally), critics need to be careful not to presume too readily that such films are supporting one’s own pet peeves or viewpoint.
Stealing a lover from another individual is the perfect set-up for later paranoia. I’ve always felt it to be extremely foolish to want to transfer the affection of a person who is already in an established relationship (a marriage, an engagement, even a steady dating relationship) to yourself, no matter how strong the temptation might be. If you succeed, it indicates that your love object’s capacity for commitment and loyalty is suspect. Having succeeded yourself in stealing the person from another, it is reasonable to expect that another might later steal your lover from you. I don’t say that such reasoning applies if the person’s current relationship is casual.
Buñuel was notorious for his criticism of established religions, especially the one that caused him personal grief as a child – the Catholic Church. El offers a typical Buñuel assortment of attacks on the church. I share Buñuel’s disdain for organized religion but am more content than he, I believe, to ascribe to it a more limited number of sins. Buñuel’s attacks on Catholicism sometimes exceed what is credible. He plays fast and loose in his criticism, especially in El. Buñuel seems to want to place the blame for Francisco’s affliction on The Church, relating it by implication to his excesses of sexual repression, obsession with purity and chastity, and misguided and hypocritical spirituality. In his biography, however, Buñuel says that El is “simply the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made.” Buñuel also hints at the biological factor in the conversation during the dinner party scene. A guest comments that the design of Francisco’s home seems to reflect a man guided by sentiment, emotion, and instinct rather than reason. Father Velasco informs the guest that it was Francisco’s father who designed and built the house. When we later come to understand that Francisco is guided by errant emotions more than reason, we can imagine that this quality is in Francisco’s bloodline. Modern evidence supports a biological basis for Delusional Disorder rather than any association with a religious upbringing.
Still, not all of Buñuel’s jabs at the Catholic Church go so far awry. The opening fetishistic scene certainly illustrates the strange perversity of some of the rituals inherent in Christian religions, at least from my perspective as a non-Christian. Buñuel also takes dead aim at the utter lunacy of having men who have renounced passion advising people about passion. Celibate priests are poorly qualified, in Buñuel’s logic, to offer marital advice. Father Velasco acknowledges his lack of understanding in the matter of love when he comments, during a discussion on the topic, “My thoughts on love are sober but the turkey is excellent.” Later, however, Father Velasco too easily dismisses Gloria’s account of her husband’s bizarre behaviors as “truth colored by youthful imagination”, revealing simultaneously his ignorance and misogynistic frame of reference.
Another theme of this film is the age old question of the relative reliability of love-at-first-sight versus more gradual exploration of the potential for love. Not every person has the luxury of being especially fussy about who they pair up with, but for those who have choices, my personal recommendation is to take into account both the animal attraction factor and a prudent, detached, hard-nosed assessment of your prospective partner’s qualifications and attributes. You need the animal attraction as incentive to make the effort (in bed and elsewhere) but chemistry will not substitute for more concrete issues of compatibility.
Production Values: An interesting aspect of the script of El is that the first part of the film is told from Francisco’s perspective while the second part is largely from Gloria’s vantage point. I suppose that appropriately indicates the extent to which Francisco loses control of his mental perspective.
The cinematographic elements of El are highly sophisticated, as in all Buñuel films. The bell tower scene, for example, is a standout in composition. Buñuel’s El was a source of inspiration for other film directors. An obvious and acknowledged connection to the bell tower scene is found in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I suspect there is also an influence from El in Fassbinder’s Martha. Both films relate to jealous and paranoid husbands seeking complete domination and isolation of their wives and both husbands are engineers by profession. Martha’s husband, Helmut, is specifically a dam engineer as is Raul in El.
The performances of greatest importance to this film are, obviously, those provided by Arturo de Córdova and Delia Garcés in the lead roles. Córdova is convincing both as the sane and respectable man we met at the beginning of the film and the increasingly wacko dude that emerges as the story progresses. Córdova’s other best known work was For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), which seems ironic given the famous bell tower scene in El. Delia Garcés played the role of Gloria very effectively, providing the right mix of vulnerability and sincere empathy for her husband’s insanity.
Bottom-Line: In keeping with Buñuel’s penchant for objectivity, El is gracefully low-key yet nevertheless manages to almost drip with suspense. Although El is sometimes dismissed as a lesser Buñuel film, I would place it solidly in the second tier, just below such masterpieces as L’Age D’Or (1930), Los Olvidados (1950), and Belle de Jour (1967). I recommend El especially to those with a taste for psychodrama and Hitchcock-like suspenseful drama. El is in Spanish with English subtitles and has a running time of 88 minutes. Although unrated, this film ought to be appropriate for age 13 and above I should think.
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