by Douglas Messerli
Luis Alcoriz and Luis Buñuel (screenplay, with dialogue by
Max Aub, Juan Larrea and Pedro de Urdimalas), Luis Buñuel (director) Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, aka The
Young and the Damned) / 1950, USA 1952
Luis Buñuel’s powerful 1950 Mexican film, Los olviadados, is a study of
betrayals—betrayals by family members, street friends, neighbors and, most
importantly, by society itself. The young boys at the center of Buñuel’s work
have hardly any chance to survive, being prisoners of their economic and
sociological conditions. The marvel of this film, however, is not simply its
political and sociological statements, but the way in which it helps us to
comprehend each of these often unsympathetic characters’ behavior. Each act
seemingly out of selfish necessity, but we come to recognize those behavioral
needs, and comprehend how their obsessions arise from their simple attempts to
survive in a society that seemingly does not want them to.
In fact, Pedro
is a loving boy, who, in turn, loves animals—although he destroys several in
retribution for his own treatment throughout the film. He literally has nowhere
else to go but to fend for himself on the streets, at least finding a certain
degree of respect with his street companions, particularly from the true
villain of the tale, Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), who at the beginning of the story
has just escaped from a reform institution.
Even the violent ruffian and thief Jaibo,
however, in Buñuel’s telling, must be contextualized within the facts that he
has never known his mother or father, issues which he uses to gain sympathy
from Pedro’s mother as he develops a sexual relationship with her. Nonetheless,
we feel little sympathy for him, despite his somewhat charismatic demeanor and
appearance, when, immediately after his escape, he galvanizes his former street
friends—children who seem far younger than he—to rob and later beat an elderly
blind street musician and soon after, to kill a former colleague whom he
believes has betrayed him, Julian (Javier Amézcua)—a man/boy who has left the
streets to work in support of his drunken father and suffering mother. Pedro
lures away from his job, while Jaibo beats him from behind with a stone and
club.
In the end, the faithful Pedro is even forced to squeal on his “friend”
Jaibo in order to survive, but it does no good. In his world, each betrayal
only leads to another, until finally everyone involved is, and in some
respects, destroyed. The beautiful young girl Meche—sexually attacked both by
Jaibo and the blind man, who we discover is a pedophile—must, in the end, even
betray her affection for Pedro by helping her father dispose of his body when
they discover that Jaibo has killed him. Jaibo, in turn, reported to the police by the blind man, is shot to
death.
This early work about a kind of gang warfare makes the American musical West Side Story seem like a
church-sponsored musical morality play. For the American musical, at base,
proffers a dream of hope, of desire and possibility, despite its tragic
ending. Buñuel, as he made clear in his
voice-over prologue, offers up no answers: only the future society can
determine what to do about the street-side criminal world he portrays. These
urban waifs are destroyed without love, without hope, without a voice. Is it
any wonder that the Mexican society it portrayed, was outraged, demanding even
the director’s ouster as a citizen of that country. The tragedy is that these
same destroyed and forgotten children live still today in many of our major
cities: I’ve seen them in São Paulo, Los Angeles, New York, Moscow, Naples,
even Paris. That Buñuel’s film seems fresh 64 years after its making is a
frightening thing to report.
Los Angeles, February 27, 2014
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2014).
No comments:
Post a Comment