He (film)

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Movie
German title He
Original title El
Country of production Mexico
original language Spanish
Publishing year 1953
length 92 minutes
Rod
Director Luis Buñuel
script Luis Buñuel,
Luis Alcoriza
production Óscar Dancigers
music Luis Hernández Breton
camera Gabriel Figueroa
cut Carlos Savage
occupation

He (Original title: Él ) is a Mexican drama in black and white from 1953 by Luis Buñuel . Together with Luis Alcoriza he also wrote the script , which is based on the novel of the same name by Mercedes Pinto . The film was shown for the first time in 1953 at the Cannes International Film Festival . In Germany it was broadcast for the first time on July 7, 1970 in the program of the First German Television ( ARD ).

action

During a church service where feet are washed , the rich Francisco Galvan de Montemayor notices an attractive woman. He really wants to see her again and therefore waits for her every day in church and actually meets her again. He is rejected by Gloria, as her name is, although she too feels attracted to him. Gloria is already engaged - to a business friend of Francisco's, as he later finds out. He invites his business friend with Gloria and her mother to dinner and takes off his friend's fiancée that same evening.

After the marriage, Francisco’s bourgeois facade is crumbling and it is becoming more and more evident that he is delusional . By chance, Gloria meets her former fiancé Raul again and tells him how she has fared in the meantime:

Francisco sees harmless encounters between his wife and casual acquaintances as clear signs of Gloria's infidelity. Grotesque scenes of jealousy towards his wife are the result. He locked Gloria at home for months. Her mother and a priest do not believe her when she seeks help from them. A futile litigation involving Francisco makes his condition even worse. He tries to push Gloria down from a bell tower they visit. Shortly afterwards, only the intervention of the domestic servants prevents Francisco from killing his wife in her sleep at night. Gloria flees from her husband and returns to her former fiancé. Frantic with madness and jealousy, Francisco Gloria searches all over the city, including the church where they once met. There, Francisco believes that the priest and the crowd of believers are mocking him because his wife has run away from him. Francisco hallucinates that both the faces of the churchgoers and the priest's face turn into ugly grimaces ; a hell of a laugh surrounds Francisco until he completely loses control and tries to strangle the priest. Thereupon he is overwhelmed, taken to a sanatorium and then accepted into a monastic order .

After a few years, Francisco is visited by his wife, who has since been divorced from him, along with their son - named "Francisco" - and their current husband, the former fiancé Raul. Gloria does not answer a monk's question about the child's fatherhood. Francisco's healing has obviously only taken place incompletely: He moves away with bizarre step movements over a staircase. He had already climbed the stairs at home in a state of great excitement.

criticism

The lexicon of international film refrains from a rating. It merely sketches the plot and notes succinctly that the work is a "surrealist melodrama from Buñuel's Mexican period". The Protestant Film Observer summarizes his criticism as follows: “Impressive study by the Spanish director Buñuel, aggressive and at times critically exaggerated in relation to bourgeois conventions. Worth seeing for adults. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Source: Evangelischer Filmbeobachter , Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 302/1970, p. 306
  2. ↑ Lexikon des Internationale Films, rororo-Taschenbuch No. 6322 (1988), p. 881.