"Los Olvidados" (1950)

Los Olvidados: the landmark film that capitalized on Bunuel's absorption of the italian neorealist wave, particularly de Sica's films, and most notably Shoeshine. Direct comparisons can be made to Shoeshine, in plot and pace; but not so much in pathos: it is Bunuel's work that advances the central idea to its brink -- that poverty is not as horrid to children as that they are unloved and forgotten in its squalid alleyways and gloomy shanties -- and in doing so, breaks the story of any sentimental echo, creating a fundamental disorder in the accepted notions of damaged childhoods. This, then, is no Slumdog Millionaire; here there be wolves. Removed from ideas of the purely good and from the facile definitions of evil, the typical dichotomy of hope/hopelessness is shattered, and a stone bursts the head of a bloodied forgotten boy. A sanity of observation takes place, in which we participate not as voyeurs, nor as document-readers, but as witnesses to the spiritual life of homeless orphans. We are impelled toward action of some kind, yet the film resonates so strongly, so soberly in the perception of manic atrocities, that we are enjoined only to listen, watch, and desire incompatible realities. (Bunuel's old trick: to allow us to hallucinate, even within documentarian scapes, worlds that only reckless dreams conjure.) A dichotomy, like that of Gerard de Nerval's "dream/life" -- a division like that of the madness that bests the angels who witness the unchecked injustice that daily hounds the meek and the unfortunate and the violent and the corrupt alike: we see that the young boy did not steal the knife he is accused of stealing, an object which he helped give shape to with pride, and that no one believes him because he is low-born and his face is dirty, and that even his own mother disowns him; we see that his friend, El Jaibo -- a mere boy, but a thief, a killer of sheep and men -- lies with the boy's mother, and that his mother bore him as a bastard and coldly dismisses him from her sight. Here the command is to pay attention to the injustice at hand, to see the regularly unseeable, to remember the impossibly memorable. We are entrusted not to judge, but to internalize...
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Los Olviados don't exist; they are dead souls, but we see them and their ruthlessness, their leprous laughter, their dead-tired talk, their raw meat nightmares, in the camera's invisible domain: they walk the streets unnoticed by the street vendors, the stray dogs, the business-minded busy-body suits who pretend they are on Madison Avenue and not in a swap meet where blind lechers sing of the storied days of Porfirio Diaz. Who among the thirsty and the starving are unblemished, innocent, entirely blameless? Who among the champions of law and righteousness are not merciless dictators -- psychic terrorists -- over those who have no choice but to break those laws that bind them to either starvation or shame?
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(The film is brutal: because those we are led to believe we hate: subject us to pity; and those we believe we trust: turn out vicious: depraved: and craven.)
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A film as lean and structurally perfect as anything I've laid eyes on; a film that demonstrates once and for all that Bunuel is not just a master of surrealism, but also a master of synchronicity; a master of extreme, torrid, unromanticized realism. Thus: Los Olvidados may be Bunuel's finest work because it is the most improbable, the most surprising in his case; we know from Las Hurdes that he was capable of unflinching realism, but never had we thought that in so felicitous a fictional structure as this -- in which parts and whole disappear in the liquid exposure of his universalized, particularized, thesis -- could he achieve such allegorical brutality;  a film made when he was still youthful with ideas -- that is, when he was still prone, at least, to serious reflection as to why the ills of the world should exist -- and therefore in a state of idealism comparable to those who would write pamphlets on the feeding of the five thousand; when he was as yet fresh off the heels of his european triumph and pedigree, established mainly by the two films that settled his reputation as a scholar of the subconscious territories -- Un chien andalou and L'age d'or -- when he had conquered the Old World; and when he had set out to the New World -- to New York, and then to Los Angeles, and finally to Mexico City -- when he set out to set more crooked -- rather, to congest the not crooked enough -- the latin american -- specifically the mexican -- mindscape, he circumscribed the heart of the metropolis where poverty and gold were found encrusted on the same leaden walls -- and in the glass reflections of department store windows -- that children licked for sustenance and moisture or out of soul-destructive boredom; and he demonstrated that a true surrealist -- a surrealist who took his bomb raids on reality for acts of charity -- must also be a poignant realist, a human mind in deep communion with the cruelties of accident and fate at work with each other, cross-grained and inescapable. If the world order is one devoid of humor, let it be injected with the blade's fulsome smile. If the mother is a whore, then let the son be a murderer. If the friend sleeps with the mother, let him assassinate his friend too. Is there not enough perverse mystery in these harsh collations? Bunuel's genius is that he allows the Real to speak on its own terms, stripped of its ideologues, stripped even of analogues to ethical formalities.
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One final note: I suspect that the dream sequence, exceptional even in Bunuel's case, inspired Tarkovsky's rendition of the Dreams of the Mother in Mirror. We see the starving boy (Pedro) dream that his mother, who acts coldly with her bastard son in daily life, acts sweetly and motherly to him, brings him in her hands a raw chunk of steak that the boy eagerly takes in his mitts; but underneath his bed lies the dark freudian shape of the boy's friend -- the implacable Jaibo -- who lunges out upon seeing the meat drip blood on the floor and fights with Pedrito over it, while phantom chickens fly upwards, like spectres startled from the ground (in a slow-motion video reversal), feathering the air with white plumes; and the boys fight with and thrash the white fluff pillows, uncontainable rage, and the pillows burst and feather the air too, like chickens battered by a baseball bat; and the mother -- just as in dreams that switch insidiously, instantly, from pleasure to outright fear -- walks away from the scene of their struggle, oblivious of the monstrous worm that aches in both boys' hearts and entrails, the demon of hunger that nibbles away at their stunted manhood, and eats at the seeds of a moral life that they can only hint at in dreams, but which in life is denied them; for even in dreams do they fight over food, never to eat of it, neither the plate nor the knife, nor the soul that shrivels as it cannibalizes its own flesh...
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