Death in the Garden

 A French-Mexican co-production, Luis Bunuel's Death in the Garden (1956) is an unusual picture with a big budget, an uncharacteristic transitional film that marks the director's emergence from the B-movie milieu of Mexican cinema, the sombrero ghetto as it were. Bunuel's many films made in Mexico -- there are reportedly more than 20 of them -- are not well-known.  He seems to have worked in all genres including musical comedy and was, apparently, a reliable yeoman director, so reliable, ultimately, as to be entrusted with relatively expensive films with expensive casts.  At the same time, Bunuel was essentially working "under the radar" and, so, was able to invigorate his genre films with perverse touches.  Death in the Garden is not a masterpiece -- it's only "pretty good" but the film is compelling and made with exceptional, if unobtrusive, craft.  Most notably, the picture juggles a large cast of characters and manages to establish all of its principal players as vibrant, memorable, and fully rounded figures -- this is a remarkable technical achievement for a movie that is only about 100 minutes long.  

In the proverbial "unnamed South American country", a rapacious military dictatorship (possibly a bit like Franco's regime in Spain) holds sway over a wilderness of jungle penetrated by a huge green river.  A diamond mine occupies a picturesque gorge, complete with waterfall, where a ragtag group of miners (said to be about 200) are digging in the boulders and falling water for precious gems.  One of the more prominent miners is Castin, a Frenchman, who has discovered enough diamonds (he has them in a leather pouch) to buy a restaurant back in Paris; this is  his dream.  The military junta sends troops to expropriate the mine, apparently, close to a decrepit-looking village with a ruinous chapel and some garrison buildings.  Led by Castin and others, the miners pitch stones at a phalanx of soldiers who disperse them by firing a volley into the sky.  Into the middle of this confrontation, a lanky, hard-bitten stranger appears, leading his horse right between the opposing forces -- he jauntily gives the middle-finger to the soldiers.  This is Chark (pronounced "Shark") who is a solitary fortune-hunter.  Looking for a bed to occupy in the impoverished village, Chark ends up sleeping in a  prostitute's room.  When the whore named Djin (Simone Signoret) comes home from one of her nocturnal forays, she finds Chark between her sheets.  This is no problem; she sleeps with him and discovers that he has a leather wallet full of cash strapped to his chest.  She sneaks away, alerts the greedy commander of the local regiment, who arrests Chark and steals his money.  Meanwhile, the miners have attacked the soldiers and killed one of them.  This triggers an all-out battle, complete with a machine gun and impressive pyrotechnics.  The miners are beaten back and one of their leaders, who is badly injured, is sentenced to death by firing squad.  Chark, also sentenced to death, asks to write a last letter, but uses the pen to gouge out a soldier's eye so as to escape.  (The poor wounded miner, accused of insurrection, who has lost a vast amount of blood, is dragged outdoors, tied to a chair, and executed -- this outrage causes more fighting.  But the miners are completely disorganized, impulsive, and poorly led -- they are again immediately defeated.)  The commander of the troops cracks down on the miners, perceiving that Castin is one of their leaders.  Castin, who is in love with the avaricious whore, Djin, flees to her room where she hides him.  Meanwhile two more strangers have wandered into this bloody mess.  One of them is Cherco, a pimp, who has come to the village with a boat loaded with three more whores.  The other is Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli), a missionary to the wild Indians, who is caught between the opposing armed camps.  When the soldiers search for Castin, they encounter Lizardi in the prostitute's bedroom --  he's there by accident but allows the troops to think that he's been visiting the whore to protect Castin who is hiding in a backroom or closet. The soldiers have taken hostages and threaten to start executing them if the miners don't turn over Castin -- something they would gladly do if they could find him.  (He's been wounded in the head and is on the lam).  Ultimately, Castin escapes from the town on Cherco's whore-ferry.  Also on the boat are Father Lizardi, now in disgrace, Chark who sneaks on board, Castin's deaf-mute daughter, Maria, and Djin.  The tough-guy, Chark, bullies Cherco into setting off down the river with this unlikely group of refugee castaways.  Chark savagely beats Djin to punish her for betraying him to the soldiers.  (This is a characteristic example of Bunuel's sadism -- Cherk hits Djin over the head with some kind of bludgeon, pauses, and batters her a second time; surely, he's made his point and he ponders the situation for a long moment before smashing the weapon down on her a third time; the violence is disturbing and totally gratuitous.)

With the soldiers in pursuit, Death in the Garden launches into its tour-de-force second half with a passage that is  like something from Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God.  The castaways flee down the river, disembark, and plunge into the nightmarish "green hell" of the jungle.  There, they are drenched by torrential rains, wander through knee-deep mud, and, gradually, starve.  Castin goes mad and the other refugees, completely lost in the forest, bicker.  Cherco escapes from the group, (Chark has tied him up) although he is likely killed by the jungle.  Chark kills one of the pursuing soldiers, firing his long gun at the man, and the troops decide that the better part of valor is to let the forest devour the fugitives.  Just when it appears that the fugitives are on the brink of death, Chark discovers an airplane crashed in the jungle on the edge of a huge lake.  The airplane is full of provisions (and corpses).  There are jewels and expensive clothing in suitcases strewn around the jungle.  (Djin and Maria get dressed-up in elaborate and elegant evening gowns, traipse about the bug-infested wilderness as if they are in a Parisian ballroom, and, even, put on make-up.)  Castin's madness turns homicidal.  In the end, only two of the castaways survive.  The film shows them setting off in a dug-out that has magically appeared, paddling across the vast greenish blue lake toward the distant mountains of Brazil.  

Bunuel shows civilization (if that's what you can call the miners and provincial garrison) as being completely corrupt, criminal, and violent.  For the first half of the movie, everyone is trying to kill everyone else, although most of the violence is inept, sudden, and ineffective.  (Bunuel is wholly uninterested in staging this sort of violence and his "action scenes" are embarrassingly perfunctory.)  The vicious commander executes a dying man who is comatose and Djin the prostitute schemes to steal Castin's nest-egg.  When the soldiers demand that the miners surrender Castin, they are only too happy to oblige.  No one shows any vestige of loyalty and everyone acts wholly for his or her selfish benefit.  Castin, who seems like an engaging guy, proclaims his innocence of the offenses charged against him -- as if guilt or innocence means anything here -- and refuses to sacrifice himself to save the hostages; as far as he's concerned, the soldiers can execute these people, who are, of course, more or less innocent as well.  The scenes in the jungle illustrate in a primal manner, the proposition that nature is red in tooth and claw and that the corruption intrinsic to human beings is enacted on a cosmic scale in the tangled, verminous forest.  There's no refuge anywhere.  Society is corrupt and nature savage and indifferent.  The priest, who seems to want to be martyred by "wild Indians", has to tear pages out of his Bible to use as tinder in the campfires that the refugees try to build -- often with soaking wet twigs.  The tone of the film's second half is best exemplified by a remarkable sequence during the exodus through the jungle.  Chark finds an anaconda tangled around the limb of one of the huge buttress-rooted trees growing in the swamp.  He chops off the snake's head with his machete.  (Animals were definitely injured in the making of this movie and the snake is killed on-screen.)  The castaways plan to eat the snake, but are too slow in their preparations.  Father Lizardi's face is incandescent with horror.  Swarms of ants are eating the snake which writhes still on the forest floor.  After this hellish vision, the movie cuts to a night-shot of Paris, looking down the Champs Elysses toward the triumphal arch.  Cars are approaching.  But, then, the frame freezes, the traffic sounds slow to a dull rumble, and we see that Castin is gazing at a picture of night-time Paris (the image we have just seen) by the light of the guttering campfire.  He throws the picture of Paris into the flames.  Then, he tears in two a photograph of the Arc de Triomph.  The next day, the refugees trek through the towering green walls of foliage -- the film was shot on-location in the Yucatan jungles.  Chark comes across a burnt-out fire and excitedly announces that there is someone else nearby in the forest.  But, of course, then, we see the torn-in-two picture of the Arc de Triomph and understand that the day's hiking has merely brought the castaways in a full circle to the place where they started.  The film's eerie hopelessness is perfectly encapsulated in a shot in which we see that the deaf-mute Maria is shown with her long hair completely entangled in some kind of thornbush; she stands pinioned against the swarming, trembling green wall of the jungle.  

Death in the Garden is well-acted and very beautifully made.  The landscapes are palpable with verdant menace and the green rivers throb between walls of mangrove.  The scenes in the ruinous provincial town are gorgeous, bathed in a perpetual amber sunset.  The film's fantastically complex first half, a series of sequences that seem all compressed together in a diamond-like crystal of narrative, contrasts with the second part of the movie which is more slowly paced and philosophical -- Lizardi's belief in a benevolent God is challenged by the horrifying malevolence of the jungle and Castin concludes that no one is innocent and that all must be punished by death.  Half of the movie is a wild tangle of plots and subplots; the other half of the movie is the leisurely and philosophical proof of a savage theorem -- nature is hostile and, even in extremis, human beings are unable to cooperate for the common good.  It's an interesting movie, compelling and suspenseful, but seriously flawed. 

Look for a short shot right after Chark appears in town.  The camera tracks with him to a well in the town square where about a half-dozen women clad in filmy white garments are languishing in the heat.  It's a strange scene, surrealist in force -- but Bunuel doesn't linger over the weird image; it's completely matter-of-fact.