Luis Bunuel made twenty movies in Mexico between 1946 and 1963. These pictures included romantic melodramas, musicals, and comedies. Many of these films await critical reevaluation and, perhaps, aren't very good. Nonetheless, Bunuel's Mexican period produced several undisputed masterworks, El, The Exterminating Angel, and Los Olivados, among them and it's my guess that all of these pictures have scenes or interludes worth studying. Bunuel's style is impersonal and direct; everything is lit brightly and the acting is often stylized and a bit wooden. But the fact that a picture is directed by Bunuel imports into the viewing experience knowledge of the filmmaker's other movies and obsessions --this means that even banal sequences that would be unremarkable in any other director's work have a peculiar urgency, tension, and visionary quality. In an opening scene in Ensayo de una Crimen (1955), the camera shows us a still-life, a toy train on a circular track next to what seems to be a soccer ball -- for some reason, the image has a weird dream-like intensity. In a later scene, a woman in tight-fitting dress encounters the hero who is inexplicably carrying a vase. The woman claims to know the protagonist, Archibald de la Cruz, a wealthy, if somewhat smarmy, member of Mexico City's elite. The two exchange words with the woman behaving in a strangely seductive manner; Cruz simply wants to escape her. The entire scene is completely utilitarian in its structure and pacing and the camera is positioned to make everything maximally lucid and, yet, there is something awry about the imagery, something a little too avid and off-kilter. The question here posed is this: would we have this feeling of the imagery and dialogue being slightly off-balance if we didn't know that this was a film by Bunuel -- that is, would the effect be the same if the movie was directed by someone without a surrealist's filmography? It's impossible to answer this question because, of course, we inevitably bring to Bunuel's films his entire ouevre from Un Chien Andalou and L' Age d'Or to That Obscure Object of Desire.
Ensayo de una Crimen (I'd translate this as "Attempted Crimes"), known as The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz in English-speaking countries is a staggeringly perverse black comedy about a man (Cruz) who earnestly desires to be a serial murderer but can't quite get anyone killed. The picture is exceedingly ingenious and quite funny -- the movie plays like a warped comedy of manners always threatening to evolve into some outlandish grand guignol bloodbath. The Spanish word "ensayo" means something like "Versuch" in German (to attempt) or "essay" in English in the old sense of attempting to accomplish something. The Spanish title probably means something like "Essays in Crime." Cruz's murderous impulses originate in his spoiled childhood (he's a bit like George Amberson in Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons); the year is 1913 and revolutionary soldiers are shooting up the streets of Mexico City. Little Archie Cruz has been left in the care of his attractive young governess -- she hates the spoiled brat and longs to spank him, but, of course, this is forbidden. While telling the little boy a story about a magical music box that has the power to grant homicidal wishes, the young woman hears gunfire outside, goes to the window, and is promptly shot dead. She falls to the carpet with her bare thighs and garter belts exposed and blood welling out of her throat. The child is sexually aroused by this constellation of stimuli -- the story of the wish-fulfilling music box (which sits on the table), the woman's exposed thighs, and the gush of blood. This combination of images and ideas causes Cruz to feel omnipotent and to believe that it is his destiny to be "either a great saint or a great criminal"' he elects the latter and decides to become a serial murderer. We next see Cruz in a sanitarium, attended by one of Bunuel's highly eroticized nuns. Cruz menaces the nun with a straight razor and she flees in horror -- there are two oddly dreamlike and mismatched shots of the young nun in her habit running away from the camera. Before Cruz can slash her to death, she falls into an open elevator shaft and dies. Cruz seeks out a Judge and confesses that he is a murderer. The Judge is rather disinterested but sits down to hear his story. This motivates an extended flashback that occupies most of the film and that constitutes the confession tendered to the judge. Cruz is shown preparing to visit his fiance, the virtuous Carlotta Cervantes. While shaving, he cuts himself and, when Cruz sees the blood on his finger, he has a voluptuous vision of the dead governess with her plump gartered legs spread, the entire image oozing with black blood. On the way to visit Carlotta, he encounters a sexy tramp named Patricia. She knows Cruz from some gambling den that they both frequent although he doesn't seem to recognize her. In any event, after visiting Carlotta who is praying on her knees to the Virgin in a chapel built into a niche in her house (Carlotta's mother supervises the visit), Cruz goes to the casino where the lecherous Patricia tries to pick him up. Cruz rejects her advances but when she crashes the Cadillac owned by her much older, rather cadaverous admirer, the protagonist goes home with her. Patricia has a wall covered with pictures of the famous men that she has seduced -- including, notably, John Wayne. Cruz decides he will kill Patricia and gets his razor ready when her elderly admirer barges into the apartment interrupting our hero's murderous plot. There follows a odd scene in which Patricia and her boyfriend say that they are living in Hell together and seem to extend an ambiguous sexual invitation for Cruz to join them. Cruz instead flees and the couple apparently commit double suicide. Cruz goes to an old convent that is now a kind of dance-club. Here he meets Lavinia, a shop-girl who also works as a tour-guide for Gringos (Gringitos the dialogue says). Cruz is intrigued by Lavinia who also seems attracted to him. Lavinia gives Cruz the address of an expensive boutique where he finds, not Lavinia, but a full-scale mannequin that depicts her in very precise form -- perhaps, it is implied, it is even anatomically correct. Cruz has had visions of Lavinia enveloped in fire and imagines her to be "his Joan of Arc" -- apparently, he intends to strangle her and burn the corpse in the oven in which he fires his clay vases (by avocation Cruz makes ceramics). After some adventures and another encounter with the simperingly pious Carlotta, Cruz lures Lavinia to his elaborate mansion where he prepares to strangle her. But Lavinia has invited her tour group to Cruz' rather gothic manor, apparently so that they can see a real Mexican nobleman's mansion, and a big, loud group of Americans and English appear just as Cruz is stealthily preparing to murder the girl. As it happens, Carlotta is less pious than she seems -- she is carrying on a torrid affair with a married, somewhat toadish-looking, architect. Of course, Cruz plans to kill Carlotta during their honeymoon. But this plan is also thwarted. Alone together, Cruz makes Carlotta kneel before an image of the Virgin and has her intone a prayer while he prepares to slaughter her. But, before he can kill her, the architect bursts into the home and guns down Carlotta. It's this event which apparently led to Cruz admitting himself to the sanitarium and the care of the beautiful and doomed Sister Trinidad. Upon hearing this confession, the Judge laughs in a jovial way and says "I can't prosecute you for wishing someone's death." And on this merry note the film ends.
This barren plot summary doesn't capture the bizarre imagery in the film. Everyone lives in homes that are crammed with gesticulating carved saints, gory crucifixions, and gilt angels -- but, of course, no one shows the slightest trace of religiosity except for the morbidly pious Carlotta (who turns out to be an adulteress). When Cruz is thwarted in his efforts to murder the tour-guide Lavinia, he drags her mannequin, which he has earlier been kissing and caressing, into his crematorium and melts it down in his fire. On the way to the oven, the mannequin loses one of its legs --it breaks off at the plump thigh in a way that reminds us of Cruz' poor, dead governess. We get gruesome close-ups of the mannequin's face melting in the fire. Cruz has a drawer full of women's underwear that he has used to dress the mannequin and that he offers to Lavinia when she is at his home -- surprisingly, this doesn't bother her at all and she goes into another room to get dressed in the bra and panties Cruz has offered her (this is the costume in which he intends to strangle her). Earlier at the casino, Patricia takes off her shoes and offers her high-heels as a fetish-object to the other gamblers -- people stroke and kiss the shoe. (One of these shoes shows up in Cruz' house when Carlotta comes there after the wedding. Cruz kicks the shoe under the bed before firing a revolver repeatedly into Carlotta who is clad in her white wedding dress -- this turns out to be merely fantasy because, of course, the architect bursts into the house a minute or so later to actually kill her.) The movie is elaborately perverse but filmed for the most part like a Mexican telenovela or, even, a comedy. When Cruz asks the Judge, who seems completely indifferent to the hero's murderous impulses, what he should do, the Judge says quite rationally, "Use an electric shaver."
The film was scarcely visible before this reconstruction. At last, it seems that the Mexican National Cinemateque has embarked on a campaign to restore films from the country's classic, or Golden Age. Ensayo de una Crimen is a product of this effort and the film looks great and the soundtrack is clear and distinct. The movie has an incredibly cheesy score played on a wheezing organ that adds to the film's bizarre charm.
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