Abismos de Pasion (1953)

FILM: BUNUEL’S BRONTE

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: December 27, 1983

¶ OF all of the Mexican films that Luis Bunuel made for the mass market of Spanish- speaking audiences, his 1954 screen adaptation of Emily Bront”e’s ”Wuthering Heights,” called ”Abismos de Pasion” when released in Mexico, is probaby the work that’s most full of riches for those of us who consider Bunuel one of the great film directors of all time. It opens today at the Public Theater, a premiere of sorts, though it was shown by the Museum of Modern Art in 1976 and may have been shown at Spanish-lanuage theaters here in the 1950’s.

¶ ”Abismos de Pasion” – the Spanish title seems much more appropriate than the Bront”e original – is an almost magical example of how an artist of genius can take someone else’s classic work and shape it to fit his own temperament without really violating it. This ”Wuthering Heights” is nothing if not Spanish in its tone. It’s also Roman Catholic down to its toes in the way that it reflects the particular obsessions of the self-described nonbeliver who made it.

¶ Among the more remarkable things about ”Abismos de Pasion” is how little Bunuel has changed the story, at least the story as adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur for the 1939 William Wyler screen version.

¶ It’s still the tale of the mystical, all- consuming love of the well-born Cathy (here named Catalina) for her childhood sweetheart, the handsome, rudely tyrannical, former stable boy, Heathcliff, renamed Alejandro by Bunuel. The English moors are now the barren hills of rural Mexico and what once seemed to be a romantic rebellion against the genteel manners of Anglican England has now become a darker, timeless war between the forces of light and darkness.

¶ Alejandro (Jorge Mistral) is driven not just by his love of Cathy and desire for revenge against the family that humiliated him as a boy. He has, as subsidiary characters say more than once, made a pact with the Devil, and we may well believe it. This is actually a far more reasonable explanation of how, during a mysterious absence, he acquired the enormous wealth that he now uses to humble his former masters. After all, rude, unmannerly stable boys don’t easily become rich overnight.

¶ Catalina (Irasema Dilian) is also a far gutsier, far less sentimental character than Merle Oberon’s Cathy, who seemed primarily motivated by the willfulness of a pampered child. In Bunuel’s scheme of things, the love that flows between Alejandro and Catalina is so strong – and so beyond analysis in any ordinary emotional or sexual terms – that we can take it that she is part of any pact that Alejandro may or may not have made with anyone, including Beelzebub. When Catalina announces that she loves Alejandro ”more than the salvation of my soul,” the point is to shock the Roman Catholic audiences as much as the other characters within the film.

¶ Bunuel, of course, never makes any reference to the Devil without a wink of mock astonishment. In an opening message to the audience he tells us that what we’re about to see is a story about characters at the mercy of their instincts and passions. To Catalina’s faithful husband, Eduardo (Ernesto Alonso), and to his sister, Isabel (Lilia Prado), who loves Alejandro and, unfortunately, marries him, passions and instincts represent a hideous state of pre-Christian damnation.

¶ Eduardo and Isabel are believers. They are among the saved. They are civilized, a point with which Bunuel has a good deal of fun as he shows us the studious Eduardo carefully pinning a live butterfly to a mat and Isabel out on a morning stroll, shooting vultures. If the civilized are more savage than the heathen, Bunuel would prefer the company of the lost.

¶ There’s also an astonishing amount of self-awareness in Bunuel’s Catalina and Alejandro. They accept their fate as lovers who will go beyond the grave together with an unemotional kind of placidity. When Catalina warns Isabel not to marry Alejandro, it’s not because she is jealous but because she knows that Isabel will be crushed casually and without anything that might be called redeeming malice – Isabel will have simply gotten in the way of fate.

¶ At key moments, Miss Dilian displays a terrific fondness for the smug, self-satisfied smile, but that is a convention of the melodramatic acting of the time. She looks like any number of other blond Mexican actresses Bunuel used at this period of his career, representing an idealization later to be exemplified in the talent and the grand, chilly beauty of Catherine Deneuve in ”Belle de Jour” and ”Tristana.” Mr. Mistral is a more than adequate Alejandro, though his handsomeness appears to be that of a Latin American spinoff of Victor Mature.

¶ Mr. Alonso, who was later to play the title role in Bunuel’s 1955 comic masterpiece, ”The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz,” is exceptionally good as Eduardo.

¶ Among the other reasons that ”Abismos de Pasion” is not to be missed is the film’s final sequence, which is just as breathtaking as the final sequence of ”Tristana” – and even more outrageous.

¶ Love and Revenge WUTHERING HEIGHTS , (Abismos de Pasion), directed by Luis Bunuel; screenplay by Mr. Bunuel, Arduino Maiuri, and Julio Alejandro de Castro, based on the Emily Bront”e novel; director of photography, Agustin Jimenez; edited by Carlos Savage; music by Wagner adapted by Raul Lavista; produced by Oscar Dancigers; released by Plexus Film. In Spanish with English subtitles. At the Public, 425 Lafayette Street. Running time: 90 minutes. This film is not rated. CatalinaIrasema Dilian AlejandroJorge Mistral IsabelLilia Prado EduardoErnesto Alonso.

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