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A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s 1953 Mexican melodrama \u201c\u00c9l\u201d<\/a> amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, \u201cThis Strange Passion.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the rediscoveries of last year\u2019s Bu\u00f1uel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, \u201c\u00c9l\u201d opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration.<\/p>\n The initial sequence, filmed in the nave of a 16th-century Mexico City cathedral, is a well-attended Holy Thursday Mass. As the camera lavishes attention on ritual foot-washing, so does the suavely aristocratic Francisco Galv\u00e1n (Arturo de C\u00f3rdova). Then his gaze strays from the row of bare feet waiting to be washed and kissed by attending priests to a well-shod foot belonging to a well-bred se\u00f1orita, Gloria (Delia Garc\u00e9s) \u2014 and thus, a mad love is born.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Francisco, a wealthy, middle-aged virgin, obsessed with regaining ownership of once-upon-a-time family property, turns the force of his pathology on Gloria. He successfully woos her away from her fianc\u00e9 and, starting on their wedding night, makes her life a living hell. Oscillating between insane jealousy and abject apologies (but ever aroused by the sight of her feet), he becomes increasingly abusive, mentally and physically. At one point, anticipating the climax of Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cVertigo,\u201d he finagles her to the top of a mission bell tower and, suddenly enraged, tries to throw her off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Throughout, the madman is protected by his wealth, defended by the Catholic Church and even by Gloria\u2019s mother. \u201c\u00c9l\u201d has been taken as a parody of machismo, but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability. Behind the stone facade of Francisco\u2019s colonial mansion lies a clutter of chandeliers, tchotchkes and Jugendstil-patterned portals. Adapted from a quasi-autobiographical novel by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto, \u201c\u00c9l\u201d was further informed by the antics of Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s brother-in-law and, he\u2019s suggested, his own dreams.<\/p>\n Arriving in Cannes two years after Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s triumphant comeback with the anti-neorealist slum drama \u201cLos Olvidados,\u201d \u201c\u00c9l\u201d was dismissed by many, including the jury president, Jean Cocteau, as a commercial sellout. The unimpressed New York Times reviewer, A.H. Weiler, termed<\/a> the film \u201can elementary and uninspired study of abnormal psychology.\u201d (Still, no less an authority than Jacques Lacan considered \u201c\u00c9l\u201d to be exemplary, and the knowledgeable French critic Georges Sadoul recognized the film as an update of \u201cL\u2019Age d\u2019Or,\u201d<\/a> the 1930 Bu\u00f1uel-Dal\u00ed collaboration that incited a riot.)<\/p>\n \u201c\u00c9l\u201d is so blandly outrageous that it is easy to pass over its affronts. One night, Francisco appears with cotton gauze, scissors, a needle and thread and some heavy rope, hovering over his sleeping wife. To imagine his plan is to become implicated in his craziness. Inevitably, Francisco\u2019s final break with reality occurs in the same church where the movie opens (and includes a physical attack on his family priest).<\/p>\n A coda reveals Francisco living in a monastery. \u201cFaith has become his shield against the world,\u201d a brother explains. Having begun by identifying religious ritual with fetishism, \u201c\u00c9l\u201d concludes by equating devotion and paranoia. The revelations of the jolting postscript are all the more powerful if one knows that the cowled figure in the last shot is the director himself.<\/p>\n \u00c9l<\/strong><\/p>\n Through March 20, Film Forum, Manhattan, filmforum.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n