A Woman Without Love

“Based on [Guy] de Maupassant’s story ‘Pierre et Jean,’ A Woman Without Love follows an old antique dealer whose young wife deceives him with an engineer, but still will not abandon her ailing husband. Family attitudes and loyalties are gravely strained twenty-five years on when the couple’s son is left a fortune by a mysterious rich Argentinian. The film was in essence characteristic of a whole group of shoestring and virtually unplanned productions made in Mexico at the period, all based on good novels. . . . [Luis] Buñuel uses the drama to show family relationships carried to the limit of exasperation, insult, violence, Latin sadism, the demystification of the Christian concept of the holy and abnegating mother; and he found opportunities for brief, delightful sketches in the course of knocking off the muddled melodramatic narrative” (Francisco Aranda).