Bunuel L'age D'or

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century, his films invariably included in the critics' lists of the top 100. Born in the Spanish village of Calanda and shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by André Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou [1929] one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema…

En 1932 Luis Buñuel rodó en Extremadura su tercer trabajo como director, Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan, una de las películas malditas de su filmografía y documental pionero en nuestro país.
Fermín Solís retrata, en esta magnífica novela gráfica, un momento decisivo en la vida de Buñuel y quizá de todo gran creador: el dilema entre cultivar el arte por el arte o servirse de él como un medio para transformar la sociedad.

For a director like Luis Bunuel,this is a holding pattern movie.Bunuel is neither Costa Gavras nor Alan J Pakula and his political plot falls short of its goal.What's definitely lacking here is madness,the surrealism,almost present at least in one sequence,dear to the great Spanish artist.His art becomes ineffective when it deals with pure drama.The irony seems tamed,subdued.Maria Felix's part is sometimes some kind of Maupassant's "Boule de suif" (a character from the nineteenth century),sometimes some kind of thirties Marlene Dietrich (Sternberg's "dishonored").In a nutshell,originality is not this character's forte.Gerard Philipe (sadly,soon to die from cancer)is miscast and ill-at -ease ,in his part of "intellectual trying to sweeten the dictature".Nevertheless,he ended his career with something more commendable than the disastrous Vadim's "les liaisons dangereuses".