Genre and Subversion
Luis Buñuel’s Susana
History demarcates the career of Luis Buñuel into two distinct periods, the early surrealist works and the late European absurdist comedies, with a perfunctory glance offered to the (“realist”) Los Olvidados, in the process neglecting the most productive section of his career, where he worked in the Mexican film industry following his exile from Spain and thwarted Hollywood sojourn. It’s a neglect developed equally out of decades of preconceived aversions to the Mexican industry of the classical period, understood in popular memory as an inferior Hollywood, and biographical regurgiations over the supposed irrelevance of those films to the general understanding of Buñuel, at times disseminated by the man himself, that foreclose viewers from going out of their way to watch them, an act that would immediately belie those claims. Several Buñuel films of this period are worthy of reconsideration (Él, El Bruto and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz are all among his finest works) , one of which is Susana, the melodrama that immediately succeeded Los Olvidados, made at the behest of actor Fernando Soler and producer Sergio Kogan (who saw it in an opportunity to push his wife Rosita Quintana, who plays the titular Susana, into stardom, as had become a viable strategy by this point) by a penurious Buñuel finally beginning to settle within an industry after decades of hardship. Contrary to expectations, Susana perfectly exemplifies Buñuel’s subversive character, ehre not given the free reigh of his later films, but working slyly under the interrogatory eyes of an audience looking to be entertained above all.
The story is simple, banal even: one stormy night, young woman Susana breaks out of a reformatory where she had been held for years, and reaches the idyllic ranch occupied by Don Guadalupe and his family, who, against the recalticrance of mother and maid, take her in. Over the next days, Susana quickly seduces the three men of the ranch, ending with the avowed patriarch, and ruptures the family cohesion to the point of scandal, forcing the mother to step in. The narrative of the mysterious outsider invading an intimate setting is common to melodrama, most typically employed as a device to exalt the original state which overcomes the agonies of temptation. In Susana, this narrative then fulfills a dual function; there is a surface and a shadow narrative, corresponding to sentimentality and emotion, a stand-off between domesticated affection and pure instinct that fulfill the standard requirements of the genre while transcending them in what Claude Guateur calls an exercise in antiphrasis, the deliberate interplay of appearance and reality. The surface narrative concerns the world of appearances, the disruption of the good family by the evil seductress, hailing the family as virtuous, while the shadow narrative implicitly challenges that hypocrisy of the family through the excess of repressed desires and primal instincts excavated by the situation, culminating in the mother’s violent beating of Susana near the end of the film, in which the chastity and restraint commonly associated with the good mother is riven and replaced by the violent rage of her subconscious, inversing the villainy of the film and revealing the turbid, repressive contradictions of bourgeois morality.
It is only at this point of irrevocable scandal, the mother in shambles, the father ready to abandon his family, that the artifice of sentimentality intervenes. Serendipitously, Susana is arrested and brought back to the reformatory: the sun rises with the birds, as the ranch rediscovers its bucolic glimmer, ending the terrible nightmare. The ending feeling unearned, exaggetedly unreal, in some ways as if cut off from the perior scene, is precisely Buñuel’s point: it is sentimentality decoupled from emotion, or rather, it is the emulation of emotion that is the object of ridicule. Buñuel presents a critique of kitsch that however does not intellectualize itself, but rather remains grounded in the primordial components of melodrama, a genre Buñuel extolled as an essential mode of expression, and one thus necessary for reflecting on matters concerning the heart, soiled by its tendency to deteriorate into sentimentality at the hand of mass production, where its power serves conservative tendencies.
The concept of the scandal plays a central role as the rupture in the social order and the consequential loss of (public) trust in its face and the convention it stands behind. The virtues of the family lose their credibility when its members abandon their respective roles. Buñuel saw here extreme revolutionary potential. Like melodrama itself, it may however dissolve into mere sensationalism if the forces behind the scandal are unable to transform it, which is precisely what occurs in Susana, where the family against their better judgement, and the evident truth of the situation, decide to save the face of the crumbling conventions they feel but forced to hold onto by simply ignoring what had happened. What we are left with is a historical document, the desperation for preservation of a social force close to, but not yet at its point of dissolution. These people cannot yet foresee a world without family, even as its ground is eroding underneath them. The same could be said for popular melodrama which was to enter its last great stretch, gradually moving toward a more somber reflection on the institutions governing it. Susana acts as an indictment on the melodramas still harboring sympathy for outdated values and though it was not a success, it provided the first step toward a more transgressive melodrama in Mexico, opening up the possibility of critiquing the family apparatus, an avalanche that would culminate with films like Ismael Rodriguez‘ Dos tipos de cuidado decisively turning the ranchera tropes into untenable farce. The same family that just know could not imagine its death must die a sudden one.
