Aventura

Rosario is lovelessly married to an authoritarian man older than her. They have a little boy, Carlito, who is also a victim of his father's excessive severity. One day, Rosario falls in love with a good and attractive man. She decides to leave everything and follow the man she loves to Brazil. It is then that her husband has a heart attack...

Very paradoxical, this film. For about forty minutes, Maupassant's novel "Pierre et Jean" is treated as a cheap Mexican melodrama. After "Los Olvidados", this immortal masterpiece, seeing Buñuel forced to do drudge work is a heart-breaker for the demanding cinephile. On the other hand, the popular audience of the time must have loved the string of ready-made situations, the conventional characters and the hamming actors. But when, after forty minutes, everything seems lost, Don Luis suddenly wakes up. Inspired by the cruelty of the situation imagined by Maupassant (one brother inherits a large sum of money and the other nothing), he begins to rock the boat. The one he is interested in is Carlos, the robbed one: jealous, perverse, ferocious, he sets about, like an exterminating angel, destroying bit by bit the family unit. Joaquin Cordero's chilling performance makes Carlos join the cohort of the Buñuelan characters dynamiting the established order. The mother's final discourse, claiming free love and thus rejecting the conjugality imposed by society, is also a break with the painful conformism of the first part. The cinema-lover is reassured; the popular audience, as for them, must have been disoriented and left the cinema dissatisfied. Yes, decidedly, very paradoxical, this film.

This wholly typical Mexican melodrama is a modernization of Guy de Maupassant's "Pierre and Jean" which had already been filmed, straightforwardly, by Andre' Cayatte in 1943. Tellingly, Luis Bunuel dismisses it as his worst film in his celebrated memoirs, "My Last Breath"; although I disagree with him myself and nominate his musical comedy GRAN CASINO (1947) for that dubious honor, it is hard to argue that it is the least Bunuelian (and, reportedly, the most Mexican) of all his films! Strangely – for a Bunuel film of this period – it is also technically flawless, with high production values, notable sets and lush cinematography; in fact, I would go on to say that A WOMAN WITHOUT LOVE is never dull and most lesser directors would be proud to call this film their best work!

Although we have here yet another improbable happy ending here (relatively speaking), it has none of the underlying parodic intent of SUSANA (1951) and is meant to be taken at face value. What is ironic, on the other hand, is the fate that befalls the titular character: a beautiful young woman, married to a much older man, falls in love with a handsome engineer but, for the love of her son and ailing husband, selflessly sacrifices her own happiness – only to be branded a wanton woman by her contemptuous older son (through whose absence as a kid she had met her lover in the first place) when it becomes clear that his younger brother was the fruit of that illicit affair! Given that the older son's relationship with his stern father was hardly a friendly one anyhow, what irks him is not his younger brother's new-found inheritance (which the latter is more than willing to share) or that he had also stolen his girlfriend/colleague – but the knowledge that his mother had been sexually active with another man during wedlock! Thus, he turns into an embittered misogynist taking out his ire on his sister-in-law, another lustful colleague he used to pursue in happier times and, especially, his brokenhearted mother. Besides, it is significant that while the mother's lover had been an industrious engineer, her elderly husband was a tightfisted antiquarian; even so, it is the former who dies young while the latter (forever on the brink of collapsing from a heart attack) survives him by many years – until dying, of all days, after one final confrontation with the older son (and one drink too many) at the wedding reception of his other son and, it should be noted, before ever finding out about his wife's infidelity!

One of the unheralded pleasures of watching these modest movies from Bunuel's Mexican period back-to-back is recognizing the actors from one film to the next; therefore we have here Rosario Granados (as the mother; she was also in 1949's THE GREAT MADCAP), Tito Junco (as the engineer; he would later appear in both DEATH IN THE GARDEN [1956] and THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL [1962]), Julio Villareal (as the husband; he was also in GRAN CASINO), Joaquin Cordero (playing the older son; he was later to star in 1955's THE RIVER AND DEATH) and Javier Loya' (in the role of the younger son; he was not only in the director's earlier DAUGHTER OF DECEIT [1951], but would go on to appear in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL).

Although A WOMAN WITHOUT LOVE has, somewhat surprisingly, been given a R1 DVD release, I opted to acquire the film through alternative channels – a decision I now rather regret since my copy was intermittently plagued with instances of garbled sound! By the way, I do not know if it was intentional or not but, when Jeanne Bunuel (the Spanish film-maker's French widow) issued her own autobiography which, reportedly, was occasionally unflattering to her husband, she chose to give it a similar title to the film under review i.e. "Memoirs Of A Woman Without A Piano"!

In Mexico, Rosario (Rosario Granados) has a marriage of convenience without love with her husband Don Carlos Montero (Julio Villarreal), who is a rigid and conservative antiquarian older and older than she. When Don Carlos punishes their son Carlitos (Jaime Calpe) without listening to him, the boy runs away from home. The engineer Julio Mistral (Tito Junco) finds Carlitos and brings him home, becoming a family friend. Soon Rosario and Julio fall in love with each other and have a love affair. Julio invites Rosario to move with him to Brazil with Carlitos but Don Carlos has a heart attack on the day that they would be traveling. Rosario sacrifices her true love to stay with Don Carlos and Carlitos.

Many years later, Carlos (Joaquín Cordero) and his younger brother Miguel (Javier Loya) are graduated in medicine and love the same woman, Luisa (Elda Peralta). They both plan to rent a building for a medical clinic and work together. Out of the blue, a notary that is friend of the family tells that Julio has died and left his fortune to Miguel that was chosen by Luisa. The envious and male chauvinist Carlos questions the fidelity of his mother and the biological origin of his brother.

"Una mujer sin amor", a.k.a. "A Woman Without Love", is a movie directed by Luis Buñuel with a melodramatic story of a woman that needs to choose between her true love and her family and the consequences of her choice in a chauvinist society. The gossips have never reached Carlos Montero or Miguel, but the weak and detestable Carlos. The conclusion can be easily understood by Latinos, with the brothers making up. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Uma Mulher Sem Amor" ("A Woman Without Love")

A Woman without Love is sort of like not even a full Telenovela but a Cliff-Notes or reel of a Telenovela (minus the narration), featuring infidelity, family secrets, biological Questioning (who *is* the father dun-dun-dun), a status-quo upturning Last Will, and emotional turmoil, but with performances that are fairly perfunctory and because of the time jump from when the Don Carlos has his heart attack to when the children are grown up doctors, we lose a lot of time that has to be later explained, especially in the (not bad) emotional climax... and then it just ends in a very pat way.

One wants to find some in between the lines commentary, if no surrealism, something that says that these bourgeois ideals of having it all now with this inheritance will mean something else than grudges and pettiness (unless if that's the point), but it's kind of going through the motions, albeit within a brisk 85 minutes. Maybe the story, which seems to be based on a lesser known De Monparsssat novel, should have stuck to one time period or the other, when Julio (the "other" man) was around more (we dont get to know him much except he isn't as rotten as her husband), or later with flashbacks, especially since the adult son Carlos takes over and is just an annoying character (funny how they don't even try to make the now middle aged/older Rosario look older as her kids age).

Buñuel can create competent drama as a director even under such low-budget quick-shoot circumstances (this despite himself calling this his "worst" movie, which belies that there is still some craft), but the movie should really be even more with the Woman of the title, Rosario, and she is given the short shrift ultimately with all these bullish and stubborn men in her lives (especially the petulant Carlos). That's the funny thing in a way, just how much despite the title it becomes a story centered on the wants and fears and grievances of men, while poor Rosario is left to sulk and look ashamed for most of it.

More like Luis Ehhnuel.

Luis Buñuel thought that "Woman Without Love" was the worst movie he ever made and he wrote about it in his autobiography, "I'd been told to set up a screen on the set and just copy André Cayatte's movie (1943 film version of Guy de Maupassant's Pierre et Jean) scene by scene. Not surprisingly, I made it my own way, but it was still a disaster". I don't agree with him. I believe that he never made a bad film - he simply could not. Even if it lacks in his trademark surrealism, it still has his intelligence, his craft, and the ability to make a rather forgettable melodrama interesting and insightful. I am sure many directors would be proud of Woman Without Love. With changing the title of the movie and Maupassant's novella from Pierre et Jean to Woman Without Love, Buñuel, focuses on one of his favorite subjects - couple in love longing for each other and their inability to fulfill their desire due to all types of obstacles, social and religious, is evidently present in the film and elevates it above countless soap-operas. It is beautiful; it moves well, it is based on the writings by a talented writer. I like the acting, and the finale was not disappointing. "A woman without Love" may not be the best Luis Buñuel's film but as his devoted fan, I could not skip it and I am glad that I saw it.