|
From Yorkshire Moors to Mexican hacienda, the thunderous Brontë essence. The introductory tableau of buzzards on a desiccated tree is animated by off-screen gunfire, Cathy (Irasema Dilián) enters with shotgun in hand to find her husband (Ernesto Alonso) pinning butterflies to a board. The bourgeois lunk is part of the manor, meanwhile Heathcliff (Jorge Mistral) materializes amidst a downpour and smashes through the kitchen window, "he ignores what's sacred to follow instincts." The brooder is back for vengeance and relishes his hold on Hindley (Luis Aceves Castañeda), Isabella (Lilia Prado) offers tenderness and is imprisoned in his rocky villa for her trouble. Love and hatred as two sides of the same coin, emotions "not of this world" as the language of surrealism—what a mighty head of steam Luis Buñuel gets up on all of this! Wyler's version is stripped of its tasteful mist, here blasting sunlight bakes the characters' frenzies on parched scrublands. (Stroheim figures markedly in the treatment, slaughtered hog and all.) Febrile symbolism abounds, the former stable boy and his childhood beloved revisit their old haunts in the woods and find knife and lamp and rope inside a tree trunk, in a fit he destroys them as she leans back and smiles. Primeval customs (coals with frogs to exorcise a home) and proverbs ("To a blind dog, everything looks like flies") for the primeval terrain, the L'Age d'Or tremor cracks it open. Abyss of passion, "la libertad de muerte" (cf. Ulmer's The Strange Woman). Rivette's later telling (Hurlevent) exudes Tourneur calm, Buñuel instead shoots the fireworks in a masterful climax: Bereft Heathcliff descends into Cathy's tomb in an anguished-ecstatic daze, the beckoning spirit at the top of the stairs turns out to be a vengeful bullet, Tristan und Isolde receives "the black hole between the eyes." With Hortensia Santoveña, Francisco Reiguera, and Jaime González Quiñones. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |