Luis Bunuel's ABISMOS DE PASION

The funeral procession for Catalina passes by a naked tree. One of the many stark images featured in ABISMOS DE PASION (1954), Luis Bunuel's Mexican produced adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS.

Mise en abyme occurs within a text when there is a reduplication of images or concepts referring to the textual whole. Mise en abyme is a play of signifiers within a text, of sub-texts mirroring each other.

The above Wikipedia definition of the French literary term, used in literary, art and film criticism, will do as a guide for these thoughts on Luis Bunuel's Mexican shot take on Emily Bronte's classic. 

The repeated application of Wagner cues over the emotional turmoils of the lovers, Catalina and Alejandro, becomes an over-the-top, some would say tedious device with which Bunuel signals his surrealist technique of blasting apart the narrative of the novel while adhering to its structure. Music is a signifier and a meta-text in Bunuel's filmography, the very same Wagner strains are heard over the flailing of another set of lovers acting out against bourgeois convention in the director's once banned L'Age D'Or (1930). And, of course, Jesus Franco, the subject of this blog, another Spanish surrealist/anarchist, also has a long history of using all types of music, from Jazz (his Clifford pen name) to classical, Liszt (SINFONIA EROTICA) to provide repeating sub-text to his films within films. 


Leaving aside the classic 1930's Hollywood version of Emily Bronte's Gothic Romance, it may come as a surprise that Luis Bunuel's 1954 version, set on a desert hacienda, is refreshingly free of the kind of pomp and hushed tones which can foredoom a film of a famous literary work. It stands as a work on its own and is perhaps best approached without reference to other films versions or the novel itself. Once one does reference those other texts Bunuel's personal involvement becomes the crux of the issue.


It's simply the story of a propriety stomping, foaming-at-the-mouth madman, Alejandro, and how he manages to destroy both himself and Catalina, the women he loves. Bunuel, as a lifelong surrealist and anarchist, stripped the story to its biological essentials: love is reduced to a sexual dysfunction.
The local landlord (Archibaldo Cruz himself, Ernesto Alonso) is obsessed with insects while neglecting his sexually frustrated wife, Catalina (Irasema Dilian). He can be seen as a convulsive masochist who unconsciously wants Alejandro (Jorge Mistral) to hurt her and to make it as painful as possible. Alejandro, being a sadist programmed by bourgeois rejection, wishes her to burn forever in Hell. They don't, and can't, make love stories like this anymore. And the roots are there in Emily Bronte's text. Bunuel opens his adaptation with a shot contemplating the tangled roots of tree somewhere in the Mexican desert. Nature's roots mimic the psychological roots of human behavior.


Bunuel goes his own way, and it's the way of madness. Alejandro is not unlike Bunuel's equally crazy protagonist in his once scandalous L'AGE D' OR, which was banned by the French police during its 1930 theatrical run. In that film the antihero goes out of his way to kick a blind man, the classic symbol of helplessness. In ABISMOS DE PASION Alejandro is a home invader and tomb violator. Born to be Bad. He twice burst into Catalina's well ordered home by crashing through double window casements. He's an unstoppable force of nature. Like the wind driven rain which drenches much of the film's action. It's no accident that most of the action seems to unfold within the collective unconscious of this cast of characters. The narration itself is deliberately unreliable.

 The setting, with its pitiless desert vistas dotted by stark cacti, evokes another genre, the Western. The rough justice meted out to Alejandro as he acts out his necrophiliac obsession looks ahead to images in another film dealing with obsession and death in Mexico, the odd Western/ Noir/Horror film composite, Sam Peckinpah's BRINGME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974), another tale of below the border Mad Love which dooms the lovers. Catalina's ineffectual husband, as played by the Ernesto Alonso, the perverse protagonist of Bunuel's 1955 ENSAYO DE UN CRIMEN, is the ultimate smug, owning class prig. Concentrated on collecting and sticking pins into his insects, he is subtly nudged out of the compositions so that only the odd close-up of his quivering hand sticking another butterfly into his glass cases acts as a reminder that he's there to essentially perform the same function on his neurotic wife.

The film opens with images of gnarled roots over which the credits unfold, as if to illustrate that this will be an examination of the roots of sexual dysfunction. The the next shot shows birds being blown off the branches of a tall tree by blasts from Catalina's shotgun, her weapon of choice. The image of the gun toting heroine blurs her sexuality. Her masculine side expresses itself in violence just as her husband's feminine side finds expression in his sedentary hobby of decorating the villa with cabinets of pinned insects. In the midst of all this, Alejandro, who prefers to enter the villa bursting through windows rather than walking through doors, can be understood as a viable alternative for Catalina. The fact that they are from two different classes and that their bond was sealed in childhood makes their relationship a socially subversive act resulting from the developmental stage. Class boundaries are there to be broken in Bunuel's films.



Bunuel plays the action in long shots which coolly analyze the symbolic nature of the drama, or shall we say Mexican Melodrama. For example, the necropolis where Catalina is buried is photographed from the same angle as the villa and the nearby workers quarters. Life, Work and the Tomb are all given equal value. The roots in the opening image and the final shot of the metal doors clanging down effectively frame the director's "to-the-earth-we-will-return" overview. Bunuel orchestrates his grim mise-en-scene as an extremely scaled down black and white [Wagner] opera, and it's no coincidence that he has chosen cues from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" as an ironic musical commentary (cf. L'AGE D'OR). And in Bunuel's film text Catalina can be read as a 19th Century Feminist, forthright, living her life on her preferred emotional playing field, sharing love with two inferior men and asserting herself within a subservient role while trapped in a sick body. She is never a victim, although she may be a femme fatale.



ABISMOS DE PASION is no masterwork. It's not in the same league, for instance, as the searing LOS OLVIDADOS (1950). The tone is uncertain at times and the acting ranges from acceptable to mediocre. Irasema Dilian and Jorge Mistral are essentially miscast as Cathy/Catalina and Heathcliff/Alejandro, but the film still works despite that seemingly fatal flaw. Actually, their somewhat awkward performances sometimes telegraph the out-of-control L'Amour Fou within their characters. It's Bunuel working with a text in which the Surrealists found a compelling spirit (he collaborated on a shooting script in 1931) and he has remained faithful to that spirit and to himself. It's possible for someone to know nothing about Luis Bunuel and his career and still enjoy the film as a Latino retelling of Bronte's popular classic. The signature Bunuel wicked humor is there, but one must read against the grain to fully appreciate it. A fascinating example of how Bunuel, the culture jumping auteur, can adapt a well known literary work from another culture and make a personal film out of it.

The above review is my contribution to the Bunuel Blogathon at www.flickhead.blogspot.com/

(C) Robert Monell, 2018 renewed.