Susana (Mexico, 1951)
D: Luis Bunuel

Criterion’s relatively-new Eclipse series releases box sets of overlooked films, free of special features but cheaper than a Criterion Collection “special edition” equivalent. My wish list of what Eclipse should cover is growing. I would still like them to do a Jacques Rivette set, but oh, how I would relish a survey of Luis Bunuel’s Mexican period – that decades-long period of exile in which the famous Surrealist produced low-budget, crowd-pleasing melodramas with delicious touches of fetishism, black comedy, and subversion. Many of these films are still unavailable on DVD, but I take what I can find: like a screening of Bunuel’s Hitchcockian comedy The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque in the fall of this year (paired deliriously with Pedro Almodovar’s Live Flesh, which quotes the film); or a StudioCanal box set, imported from the U.K., which rigorously covers Bunuel’s late period but also includes his Mexican (and English-language) film The Young One. Then there’s Susana, which I just watched on a DVD from Cinemateca, with a crude menu, no special features, and subtitles so small they’d be more effectively used for an eye exam. So entertaining is this bizarre little B-picture that you soon forget your complaints; or maybe that’s because you’re not reading the subtitles at all, but admiring the visual storytelling that renders the subtitles irrelevant. Or perhaps you’re simply gazing at Susana’s enticing legs.  During his Mexican-studio years, Bunuel would occasionally let slip a personal work, a masterpiece (Los Olvidados, Nazarin, The Executing Angel), but more commonly he would need to settle with contorting the conventional into a slightly odd new shape, but in such a subtle fashion that many wouldn’t notice. He wasn’t making movies for the editors of Film Comment – he had no reassurances his films would ever be seen outside of Mexico. But there is a personal touch to these pictures which is unmistakable once you’ve seen enough Bunuel; he is always present in his films, winking at you, as though his whole filmography is sustained on the back of one very strange private joke.

Blonde bombshell Susana (Rosita Quintana) is introduced inhabiting, by all appearances, a Universal monster movie: imprisoned in a cell filled with straw, surrounded by unwholesome creatures to which she immediately likens herself (improbably, a tarantula, rats, and a very large bat that hangs from the ceiling), she pleads to God to be set loose in nature, at which point, immediately, the cell bars come free in her hands, and she climbs to freedom by flashing lightning and rolling thunder, screaming madly with joy, crawling upon her belly in the mud to escape razor wire – she is wild, man-destroying lust, a monster on par with Frankenstein’s, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.  Soon she discovers an idyllic Mexican ranch, overseen by the stern Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), his scholarly son Alberto (Luis López Somoza), and the matriarch Dona Carmen (Matilde Palou).  Guadalupe is upset because his prize mare has given birth to a stillborn, and is now herself on death’s door – and will remain so while the story unfolds, for the ranch has fallen under an unspeakable curse.  Little do they know that the ill omens are warning them of Susana, who arrives with the terrible storm, and is glimpsed staring at the frightened household through the window, a ghostly apparition straight out of Turn of the Screw.  Integrated into the family as a servant, she soon begins behaving diabolically, first enflaming the eager, studly ranch-hand Jesus (Víctor Manuel Mendoza), then working her wiles on the virginal Alberto.  (She pretends to be shocked at the sight of male nudity in one of his books, before he explains that it’s a classical depiction of Apollo, god of poetry and the arts; within the minute she is covering him with passionate kisses.)  She’s climbing a ladder, with her eyes ultimately set upon Don Guadalupe, although this simple storyline is never actually stated, and is delivered rather incoherently.  In Bunuel’s hands, Susana is the story of a succubus set loose, acting as an agent of chaotic lust in the farm, setting one against the other to no apparent strategy until we finally see Guadalupe prepared to throw his wife out, and then we have to intuit, okay, this must be what she was after.  Yet one event does not follow the other through ordinary cinematic logic.  Bunuel is simply not interested.  He is interested in Susana, in particular her body, in particular her legs.  Those inclined to track his personal fetishism will be greatly amused at the amount of screen time given to Susana’s lower limbs: here draped in mud, there splattered with egg yolk.  Given that the film is ostensibly moralizing (the evils of temptation, and the dangers of Woman in particular), it’s nothing but delightful that Bunuel clearly doesn’t buy any of it, nor does he particularly care if you do.  The film, of course, is no more a straight-up drama than Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.  It shows its true colors in that opening scene in the cell, and most particularly in the repetition of Susana, each time she wants to make an impression, lowering her blouse off her shoulders with great fuss.  It’s a costume change akin to Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth.  Eventually the men in the white coats do show up, at just the right moment, and we get a wonderfully phony resolution – Dona Carmen forgives her husband and son, Jesus is welcomed back, the mare recovers - which is so perfect that it is utterly insincere.  As the years progressed, Bunuel would refine his skill in creating subversive “happy” endings, such as sneaking a menage-a-trois reference into the last line of Viridiana, or strongly implying that Belle de Jour has not been forgiven by her husband, but slipped back into a dream (or insanity).  A modern viewer of Susana can relish the sophisticated camp, and the fact that Bunuel, temporarily beholden to commercial interests, never lost his bite.