Bunuel in Mexico: “The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz“

For a number of reasons, I prefer the original Spanish title “Ensayo de un crimen”. “Rehearsal for a Crime” is a lot more accurate, if it does give away the whole premise of the film. I’m not sure how much of an influence Hitchcock might have been on Luis Buñuel (or vice versa, for that matter), but it might be worth looking more closely at the pair.

Whatever the case, the film at hand is a pure Buñuelian joy. It would be unfair to say that by 1955, Buñuel was not yet highly regarded in internationals cinema, but too much of his work in Mexico is - while never ignored - often glossed over to get the “hits” (“Tristana”, “Belle du Jour”, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”, etc.) This is a pity because the period is replete with stone masterpieces; “Viridiana”, “Los Olvidados”, “Nazarin”, and “El”. Much of his work was as a director-for-hire, but arguably, it was Buñuel who put Mexico on the map as a producer of films of international repute. 

After decades of itinerant work between Europe and the United States, and within the U.S., ping-ponging between Los Angeles and New York, the move to Mexico was shrewd, to say the least. Buñuel worked behind the scenes on a number of films, often directing (without credit), editing, script doctoring, and so on. His own films remained championed by friends like Octavio Paz, especially when they ran afoul of the government or the Catholic Church. It would be outside the scope of this review to go into too much detail about his years in Mexico, but at some point, I’m going to have to do a longer reprise of his work in the country.

“Ensayo de un crimen” is based on the novel by the same name by Rodolfo Usigli, who shares a screenwriting credit but parted ways with the director because of the changes Buñuel wanted to make to the story. Buñuel, to be sure, just wasn’t interested in some aspects of Usigli’s work and my assumption is that - since this is very Buñuelian picture (it really is!) - Usigli may not have been happy with Luis’s more subversive ideas. And subversion is very much the name of the game.

Archibaldo is a wealthy man whose story begins in childhood during the Mexican Revolution when his nanny is killed by gunfire in the streets. Young Archibaldo was a horrible child who was testing the veracity of a story about a music box his mother had just given him to get him to behave (why would she think that he would behave after he got the goods?) Essentially, his nanny tells him that the music box had been weaponized by a genie and was used by a wicked king to kill his enemies. Little Archie decides he wants to try this out on his nurse who is shot in the neck and dies shortly after he sets his intention.

In typical Buñuel fashion, young Archie is actually aroused by the death of his nurse and we quickly see him grow into a peculiar man, recovering from his wife’s death, in a hospital attended by a fetching nun. When he attempts to lure the sister to her death by barber razor, she flees right into an open elevator. Only there’s not elevator car and she plummets to her demise.

Even though the nun’s death is ruled a suicide, Archie turns himself in and recounts his life of murder to the judge. There’s Patricia, an ingenue who flirts with Archie as he is en route to visit the seemingly virginal Carlota. Patricia tells Archie to come visit the gambling den he used to frequent and meet her there. After visiting Carlota, Archie stops off at his home to pick up a pair of gloves and a razor, and shows up at the place, watching from a distance as Patricia flirts annoyingly with the men at the table. She is accompanied by the man she called her “guard” but we can ascertain to be her older lover.

After he cuts her off from spending money on her losing streak, he takes his leave; she tries do cajole cash out of Archie who says no, and excuses himself. Patricia has an argument with her boyfriend Willy and he says they’re done. She gathers up her wrap and leaves, Archie follows her out, shadowing her. She gets in what turns out to be Willy’s car and crashes it into a brick wall. Archie comes to the rescue and for a moment, we wonder if the car crash did Archie’s job for him. It didn’t and she invites him over to her place where we see that Patricia isn’t a complete dope and she senses that Archie is with her for me than the fun and games previously hinted at. We also discover that he’s a teetotaler, she preps a tray of drink for her and a glass of milk for him. While she’s doing so, Archie is entertaining images of seducing Patricia and slicing her neck. Also, while she’s preparing their libations, Willy lets himself in and we see the couple making up. Apparently, they do this a lot.

When Willy and Patricia enter the living room, Archie is understandably taken aback, but also has the good taste to take his leave. However, they won’t hear of it! Please stay, apologies are offered for their melodrama, how they love each other but can’t quit each other, how Patricia is always flirting and driving Willy away only to beg him to come back, and so on. By the point that they have established this, you do kind of side with Archie and wonder if he shouldn’t put them both (and us) out their collective misery.

As it is, Archie leaves the couple who begin a new row arguing over who made him leave and so on into the night, we assume. The next day, Archie is visited by a detective in his ceramics studio, who asks him if he knows Patricia Terraza, and his whereabouts the previous night. We learn that after Archie left, Patricia was found dead, her throat cut. We also see Willy similarly interviewed and learn that Patricia had committed suicide, leaving a note that she could no longer continue the way things were going.

My first thought was that we were going to find out that Archie had, in fact, doubled back and murdered Patricia, but quickly realized that were now into a prime example of Buñuel-interruptus (think of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” in terms of thwarted desire). 

Then there’s Lavinia, a tour guide to gringos that Archie sees in another bar one night as he sits down to sip his milk and enjoy his pipe. He sees her across the table in a corona of flames and we recognize her as a young woman with an older man about to buy Archie’s music box from an antiques dealer. It was at this point, earlier in the film that we discover that Archie’s parents died in the Revolution and their home looted. Archie tells the couple and the owner of the shop about how much the music box means to him (not, by the way, saying anything about the more lurid aspects of his desire…just so we’re clear…)

In any case, Lavinia sees Archie and moves over to say hi and in an echo of his meeting with Patricia earlier, Archie needs to have his memory jogged as to where he had seen her before. I think we can safely assume that Buñuel is targeting the would-be killer’s objectification of women as a major part of his pathology. As well, he seems to target women of easy virtue (in his eyes, at least), particularly after it becomes clear that Lavinia is also fleecing the older gentleman we had met with her earlier (introduced as his father to Archie and uncle to the tourists). When Archie asks when they can see each other again, she writes an address down and says he can find her there; she’s at the place day and night, always confined.

Lavinia departs with her father/uncle/whatever. The next day, Archie calls on Carlota again and reaffirms that she is his savior; he’s not a good guy but her purity would be his salvation and he knows he can change with her as his wife. He proposes marriage, and naturally, she needs time to think. She also needs time to decide what to do with her lover who’s still married (his wife refuses to divorce him). 

Archie, while waiting for Carolta’s decision, pays Lavinia visit at the address that turns out to be a high fashion boutique and while Lavinia herself is not there, a mannequin plainly modeled on her is. Hence, she is confined there day and night. He inquires where the store gets there mannequins from and goes to the studio where Lavinia is wrapping up another of her side gigs as artist model. She gives Archie kudos for finding her and passing her test and she agrees to come visit him at his studio in a few days. He assures her that his cousin will be there when she seems dubious that he only wants her to model for him.

The day of Lavinia’s arrival, Archie gives his servants the day off, and when Lavinia shows up, he introduces her to his cousin; the mannequin with her features. It’s a clever jest and after making small talk, Archie gives Lavinia clothes to change into for the modeling session (an earlier moment where we see Archie caressing a bra and panties is exemplary Buñuel). When she returns, he has dressed the mannequin in her clothes and suggests they have a drink. He leaves her alone while he prepares the scene of the crime and his milk and her drink. As they set to, there is a knock at the door and lo and behold! It’s a gaggle of tourists that Lavinia invited to show around his studio (and apparently, home). She introduces him as a great artist and before the group leaves, he insists that she keep the new clothes and he’ll keep hers on the dummy as a memento since she’s told him - yeah, she’s getting married.

The sequence where he drags the dummy to his (apparently industrial-sized) kiln is hilarious. The right leg falls off which only makes it more disturbing as he lays “her” out on the slab, replacing the leg and sending her off to cremation, which he watches, excited as the mannequin melts (almost as disturbing as the eye sequence in “Un Chien Andalou”). 

Carlota and her mother arrive unannounced to say that Carlota accepts his proposal, much to her architect lover’s dismay, whom she argues with at his office. Before the wedding, Archie receives an anonymous note that if he wants to learn more about Carlota, he should come to this address and he will discover that she is not as pure as he thinks. Of course, on the appointed night, we see Carlota underscoring that she cannot continue this relationship; what kind of woman does the architect think she is? Archie can offer her security and let’s face it, he seems to mean it. Of course, he thinks she’s so pure, until tonight when it becomes clear, she’s just as naughty as the rest.

Carlota and her soon-to-be-ex part on uneasy terms; he’s not going gently into that good night. Meanwhile, Archie is planning on making Carlota kneel and pray before he shoots her to death (another prime scene that only Buñuel could pull off so deliciously…well, sure, there are others who could, but this is so very well-played.) From his revery to reality, we find ourselves after the ceremony at the chapel where there had also been a christening and a confirmation. We hone in on another fine example of Buñuel‘s recurring themes of challenging the status quo; the priest is joined by the commissioner of the district and a colonel. All three extol religion, patriotism, and power in a triad of thickheadedness. Their earnestness is played straight which Buñuel uses to reinforce their ignorance (and for the priest, at least, hypocrisy). It’s a short sequence, but well-played and funny!

After the nuptials, there is a lot of handshaking and hugging and kissing and we see a photographer getting ready to take the post-vows photos. The p.o.v. shifts to the camera’s viewfinder and before the click of the shutter, Carlota shouts at a figure outside of the frame just before the architect guns her down! 

Well, by now, we see how entwined with tragedy Archie’s life is. We return to the judge’s chamber where the judge is perplexed at Archie’s “confession”. While it’s true that Archie harbored homicidal thoughts, that’s no crime. The judge tells Archibaldo the equivalent that he might want to get out more. 

Archie goes home, stuffs the music box in a sack and tosses it into a lake in a park and as he’s getting ready to leave, sees Lavinia. The marriage didn’t work out and Archie and Lavinia smile at one another after he’s admitted he feels much better and tosses aside the cane he’d been using when we see him in the judge’s chambers. This may be one of  Buñuel‘s least cynical endings. 

That said, both Hitchcock and Buñuel do share a similarity in that their endings are not always endings; we don’t know what’s really going to happen after the credits roll. We can hope that Archie has been cured of his pathology and that he and Lavinia live happily ever after, and that would be fine for this boilerplate of a weird kind of romcom. However, this is Luis Buñuel, and despite this being a work for hire, of sorts, it still is pure LB. 

The pathology is very much a commentary on the universality of the unsavory of our unconscious processes and impulses. As a critique of society’s controls on those processes, it also questions by extension, our values in the face of all that we don’t recognize about ourselves. The division within Archibaldo is mirrored by the fissures between the women and their respective men; the widest gulf is his (and other men’s) adulation of the virginal as the pinnacle of womanhood, and the self-loathing that ensues as a result of his moral failures. 

Buñuel, who could be quite the macho, often targeted and critiqued machismo, as well as (mostly Catholic) guilt as factors that determine our actions in society and as a society. The women in his films are often read as threats to that selfsame machismo and the ruling patriarchal order, but unlike Hitchcock, Buñuel’s reading is less tragic than Alfred’s. Hitchcock’s misogyny is well-recorded and his Catholicism guides arcs of failure and redemption as a throughline in many of his films. Buñuel put the church behind him early on and remained one of its most vociferous critics for much of his life. If anything, his encounter with and use of faith as an impediment to true freedom and agency and as the source of our worst tendencies and neurotic pathologies is one of his recurring themes.

Just about any of Buñuel‘s films rewards multiple viewings and I would go out on a limb and say that out of the three dozen films he directed, there isn’t a dog in the lot. I’m not going to get too adamant about this, but I think 2023 will see me visiting more of his Mexico films. Buñuel created a body of work unlike anyone else’s. Each period is marked with works of stunning insight, brutal wit, and acute observation of humanity’s foibles. 

Unlike Godard, he’s not an overtly political filmmaker, and unlike Bergman, Buñuel is not quite as hermetic; he takes in the world around him and the social structures of that form the contexts in which his stories are set. His characters are less likely to engage in very much self-reflection; you see their selves in action. If they do examine themselves, it’s more often as Nietzschean beings flying along on wings of desires or occasionally, as embodiments of Sadean disciples of untrammeled and unrestrained hedonism. Buñuel doesn’t judge either; for him, it’s all fascinating and very often, funny. Despite all, he seemed to maintain a consistent sense of bemusement through his work, if not his life.

That said, in one very important way, Buñuel does cast a jaded on divisions in class. That Archie is a haute bourgeois shouldn’t be discounted. That his criminal compulsions have a distinctly Freudian origin doesn’t preclude his participation in patriarchy and that he targets women who from his class’s perspective would be dependent on his socioeconomic status. Even then, though, Buñuel subverts that assumption by establishing alternative possibilities for agency in how women are able to stand their ground and voice contrarian opinions, if only by saying “no” to the men in a hierarchical world determined by male prerogatives. 

Is Archie a bad guy? Who’s to say? We are very much left to ask and answer that ultimately uninteresting question on our own. More to the point is what are the causal elements in his relationships with others? Is he even aware of his own prejudices and will to power over those without his advantages? In some ways, this is immaterial; perhaps asking after the courses of the other characters’ lives might be as, if not more, fruitful. Another aspect of Buñuel’s filmography is the overarching determinacy of class and all its attendant hypocrisy. 

The more I go over this in my mind, the more I like the idea of traveling through Buñuel’s Mexico years. And who knows? I could watch any of his works from any of his periods. Maybe 2023 will be my Buñuel year…