Abismos de pasión

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You have to love Shakespeare, as they say, for having written the whole breadth of human characteristics in his pieces. Without any need to actually add any more.

You also have to love Bunuel for having done some movies that need nothing to be added, as long as they and humanity exist. This is the one on, at least, Wuthering Heights. Or, make it the impossible love.

The Spanish sense for drama, here shot in Mexico, add to the story of a man returning after years of absence to his one and only love. And does she still love him! But then, we are at the hands of Bunuel! Society kicks in with all rules, traditions, regulations, customs, boredom. And in the end, and this is what Bunuel develops so splendidly, all breaks down. And what we see, observe, is the path to this breakdown. Overwhelming love prevails through to the end, but remains unfulfilled. No, this is not a spoiler, we've known this from the book of the Brontés. Though, here we can watch its distillation, so to say, the essence.

Bunuel, as always, in principle loves all human beings around him, and yet brings out to the open all their inner limitations, frustrations, if not to say weirdness.

From its early scenes, when Alejandro returns and kind of invades the household of his by now married and pregnant love, an almost film-noir-like darkness with regular thunderstorms and scenes covered in rain, the futility of the setting becomes obvious. And, Bunuel-like, there are no heroes. Neither of the main personage is or becomes heroic.

Would I be any be better? I don't think so. Bunuel was a great psychiatrist, so to say, that he could see through all of us, and yet not despise us. Like in this movie. With minor exceptions, there is no principally bad person. They just all fell into a huge mixer and came out worse than they were in the beginning.

Like most of Bunuel's works, the main (and also the most interesting) layer of this film is the mental one. Yes, there are lots of dialogs, but it can be easily watched without hearing a word, due to Bunuel incredible talent of telling stories, feelings, fears, desires and lust exclusively through images. Only a bunch of directors are capable of achieving such a purity in visualization.

Abismos de pasiòn is a very classical story, filtered through Bunuel's will to further inspect desire (both sexual and mental). Alejandro is clearly ruled by his passion and instincts; characteristic which is praised by Bunuel, envying it.

Unlike William Wyler's movie in which Sir OlIvier shone as Heathcliff, Luis Bunuel 's adaptation of Emily Bronte's masterwork does not show Heathcliff's and Cathy's first years ;it begins when Catalina ( Catherine.) has married Eduardo (Edgar) and is pregnant by him ; the return of a wealthy Alejandro (Heathcliff )rekindles a passion that destroys everything ,knows no bounds ; they are characters of flesh and blood,following their instinct , with a love which verges on hate ; in direct contrast with that is Eduardo 's bourgeois love ,as alive as his collection of butterflies .

Bunuel's touch can be felt in this symbolism : one finds it again in Isabel's arrival in the lugubrious Alejandro's mansion -particularly faithful to the book-,where Riccardo (Hareton) catches a fly and gives it to a spider ; a pagan wedding even though he took place in the church ,even sacrilege :"I love Alejandro more than my soul"says Catalina before a shocked servant invoking Jesus and Maria ; "you'll awake in Hell " says Alejandro to Catalina. The ending takes amour fou to new limits , to the accents of Wagnerian music.

The moor -which Wyler filmed in studio - is replaced by the Mexican landscapes ,but it does not matter for the pictures are visually stunning ; the lovers' past is told in a very succint style. Bunuel focuses on lovers carried away by passion,which led them to cruelty toward the others : and eventually aren't the living in the tomb?

Briefly, my comments are directed to those who know the 1939 movie "Wuthering Heights", the novel "Wuthering Heights", and the work of Luis Bunuel. I love the novel. I love its intensity. I love its passion. I love its brutality. I love its carnal passion and its carnal brutality. Yet the 1939 Wylder version is practically sterile. Bunuel brings alive that passion and brutality. Frankly, Wylder's Wuthering Heights is embarrassed by Bunuel's when it comes to capturing the essentials of Bronte's novel. In my opinion, this fact is a reflection of the limitations put on 1930's Hollywood directors by studios looking to sell movies to a society that was unbending in its unwillingness to allow artists to truly stretch the art of film. Hollywood was slow to come around in expressing the same sexual and violent expressions that has always been present in literature from which it found its inspiration. As you might know, Bunuel has never let anything hold back his artistic expression. And in his version of Bronte's novel he takes full hold the emotion that Bronte intended us to feel.

Believe or not, this is the best adaptation of the marvelous and romantic story written by Emily Brontë in the Yorkshire Moors! Of course there are more faithful to the letter of the novel in those series made by the BBC long ago, but not the recent ones. The line story is so complicated that is very difficult for a movie to cover it fully. It's hardly believable that this Mexican movie does it so well as to be the best film on the subject, but that is the miracle of Art,

It doesn't belong to a place, but to all places, nor to a particular language, but to all languages. Buñuel's genius operates the miracle, aided by his excellent cast and team. This is the one version that captures the roots of Cathy's and Heathcliff's deep and contradictory emotions, the passions, the love and hate they shared and suffered, being all of them doomed to be unhappy in this world and hoping to be redeemed and united in the other. Placed in Mexico, black and white excellent photography, with a believable and intense cast, and a passionate, yet sometimes ironic direction, you must not judge before watching it. It is a great movie!