More chicken abuse in Bunuel’s LA JOVEN/THE YOUNG ONE, a really fascinating suspense piece with a bunch of mismatched characters on an island game preserve.
Various animals turn up and suffer — a tarantula is stamped on by the barefoot young heroine, combining Bunuel’s arachnophobia with his foot fetish. A chicken is gorily dismembered by a raccoon. As with LAS HURDES/LAND WITHOUT BREAD, one is less bothered by the sight of animals doing the unpleasant things that come naturally to them, than by the fact that Bunuel has staged it all. Real death in a fictional context. I think probably it’s a bad idea, even ignoring the ethical aspect — real death or sex seems to disrupt drama, expose the artifice. Anyway, I don’t like it.
Zachary Scott — never shy about playing nasty pieces of work, is a racist AND a child rapist; Bernie Hamilton, the captain from Starsky & Hutch, is much thinner here, as a jazz musician on the run, falsely accused of rape. Bunuel said the film confused Americans because the Black man was both good and bad — he isn’t really, it’s just that the film boldly doesn’t bother to affirm his innocence until it’s halfway through. You have to decide to root for him in a state of anxious doubt, but I think you do root for him, or what I mean is *I* did. I’m using the Kaelian “you” which means “me.”
Claudio Brook, Bunuel’s SIMON OF THE DESERT, is a typically ineffectual priest. And the title character is Key Meersman, whose only other film is ARTURO’S ISLAND, meaning she acted only on islands. She’s not too strong on dialogue (her director may have been of limited assistance, with his somewhat faltering English) but her visual expressivity is on the money. And she has a short way with spiders, which one has to respect.
A haunting film, and it has a great acoustic version of Sinner Man as its only score.
shadowplay 