Él

This is a study of “mad love” gone truly mad amidst the neurotic compulsions of the haute bourgeoisie. The protagonist, Francisco, is a forty-year-old virgin holding out for perfect—and perfectly respectable—love. Francisco’s apparent self-possession masks a ruthless severity, and his romanticism girdles insane misogyny. He takes a young wife, who tries to adjust to the tyranny of his jealous behavior, until the evening he enters her room with some menacing instruments: a rope, needle and thread, scissors, cotton wool, and antiseptic. “The influence of de Sade is everywhere apparent in a scenario that the majority of the Mexican public took for a run-of-the-mill melodrama on jealousy,” wrote Ado Kyrou. Luis Buñuel said of the film: “The character is certainly pathetic. I am touched by this man possessed by such jealousy, such solitude and interior anguish, such exterior violence. I studied him like an insect.”