“My suspicions have been confirmed”

Plot Summary: A man is driven insane by his irrational jealousy over his wife’s nonexistent infidelity.   

Review:

In L’Age d’or Bunuel wryly suggested how natural sexual impulses, when blocked, tend to manifest themselves in perverse, unnatural modes of expression, as when, memorably, the sexually frustrated heroine is moved to lustfully suck the toes of a marble statue. In El Bunuel explores a similar theme, though his subject this time is the irrational jealousy of a respectable, foot-fetishist churchgoer. Soon after marrying the lady whose foot drove him to distraction during a Good Friday service, our hero’s deeply ingrained sexual neuroses, firmly rooted in the repressive practices of the Church, come to the fore, specifically his Madonna-whore complex, which manifests itself in his disturbing, utterly irrational jealousy over the slightest hint of his wife’s infidelity. Even the most innocent of events, like his wife’s chance encounter with an old flame, sparks within him paranoid suspicions of her unfaithfulness. The potent cocktail of paranoia, jealousy, repressed lust and sexual guilt coursing through his system intoxicates his reason, renders him impotent, and ultimately compels him to attempt a ghastly act against his wife’s person involving needle and thread - the sewing of a “chastity stitch” if you will. This guy makes Jake La Motta look like a model of connubial sensitivity. Thankfully, his wife escapes this fate and ends the marriage. In the end, our hero, unable to deal with his sexual pathology, adopts the ascetic lifestyle of a monk, apparently in a futile attempt to exorcize the diseased sexuality from his body. But there’s little hope of that. In a deliciously ironic conclusion, his paranoia proves to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as his irrational behavior has driven his wife into the very relationship it was intended to prevent, which only further reinforces his delusional beliefs. Bunuel spent much of his career savagely mocking the hypocrisy of the Church and El represents his most scathing, wickedly funny effort.

Posted on June 29th, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews