Él

The best of Buñuel’s Mexican films are the ones in which his personality, interests and wit have freer reign within the constraints of narrative convention. ÉL portrays the paranoia of Francisco, a madly jealous upper class Mexican. An almost clinical psychological study, it questions the power dynamics between the long-suffering wife and the husband, unhinged by sexual desire – whether for his wife or his butler remains somewhat ambiguous. It’s also a black joke, in which the paranoid lover driven mad might just have been right all along. Buñuel said of the film: “I was moved by this man with so much jealousy, so much internal loneliness and anxiety and so much external violence. I studied him like an insect.” (Dominique Russell)

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