Los olvidados (1950, Luis Buñuel) (Patreon)

58/100

Second viewing, last seen at Theatre 80 St. Marks (double-billed with Viridiana) in 1992, shortly after I moved to NYC. By that time, I thought of Buñuel as a surrealist, having previously watched The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (still among my 25 or so favorite films ever) and That Obscure Object of Desire; don't think I knew about his Mexican period, and definitely was caught off guard when Los olvidados opens by stating "This film is based entirely on real-life events and all of its characters are authentic." I fear that those words have now twice had an enormous and deleterious impact, causing me to view everything that follows through the constricted lens of a message movie. Granted, Buñuel rarely traffics in sentimentality here—before we've even really gotten to know these kids, we see them attempt to rob and then physically abuse a blind man (who's himself later revealed to be a sexual predator; virtually nobody's spared), which you'd think would be pretty hard to trump for wanton cruelty until they subsequently prey upon a legless man. At the same time, though, El Jaibo (the oldest and nastiest boy, recently escaped from prison) at one point tells Pedro's mother about his own miserable childhood, and it's a manipulative ploy on Buñuel's part, not on El Jaibo's. The movie just stops cold for a moment to make sure we understand that these kids aren't monstrous by nature, that their lack of empathy stems from the hopeless environment into which they were born. Which is both true and crucial, but there are more elegant ways to get that idea across than having the kindly guy who runs the juvenile reformatory turn to a colleague and wistfully say "If only we could lock up poverty instead of children..."  

Ultimately, Los olvidados just doesn't play to Buñuel's strengths as I perceive them. It's a remarkably pitiless film, and doesn't engage at all in the sort of social-realist sadism that bothers me—we're trapped in the perspective of innocent victims only insofar as that's true of basically everyone on Earth, including the worst people imaginable—but there's a clunky schematic inevitability to much of what happens. When Pedro is sickened by the sight of his mother beating a rooster to death with her broom, it's strictly setup for his own (WARNING: unsimulated) chicken bashing later on, by way of demonstrating how the cycle of cruelty works. Again, that's not wrong, just overly blunt for my taste. It's not what Buñuel excels at, and I can say so with real conviction because Los olvidados also, very unexpectedly, provides a sterling example of what Buñuel does excel at. I might even go so far as to say that this film features my single favorite dream sequence of all time, both in bizarre content (Mom offering Pedro a gigantic slab of raw meat, which immediately gets stolen by Julián's corpse, hiding under the bed) and uncannily eerie form (I couldn't figure out why the slow motion seems unusually "off"; apparently the whole sequence was acted in reverse, though it looks way more fluid to me than does, say, Twin Peaks' red room; not sure I believe that anyone could step up onto a bed backwards that steadily). Obviously that's a stark rupture, but it's equally arresting when Pedro, in frustration, suddenly throws an egg directly at the camera lens, so that the image is entirely obscured for a second and then partially obscured by the albumen sliding down; that occurs right in the middle of completely naturalistic action (there's no cut, Pedro just resumes ignoring the camera), but it carries a hostile sting that nothing else in the film remotely matches. That's the Buñuel I revere. Though I've got some affection, too, for the Buñuel who offers an establishing shot of a fun fair—ah, one thinks, a brief respite from the harshness—and then immediately shows us that the carousel's being pushed by small children, who beg their adult taskmaster for a break and are told "You'll get a rest when you're dead."