by Allan Fish
(Mexico 1950 88m) DVD2
Aka. The Young and the Damned
The lucky tooth
p Oscar Dancigars d Luis Buñuel w Luis Buñuel, Oscar Dancigars, Luis Alcoriza ph Gabriel Figueroa ed Carlos Savage m Gustavo Pitaluga
Alfonso Mejia (Pedro), Miguel Inclan (The Blind Man), Estela Inda (The Mother), Roberto Cobo (Jaibo), Jesus Navarro (The Lost Boy), Alma Fuentas (Mechte), Francisco Jambrino (The Principal), Hector Portillo, Salvador Quiros, Victor Manuel Mendoza,
Luis Buñuel became a Mexican citizen in 1949, and immediately set to work on his first major film in over a decade. Admittedly the budget was spare and it had to be wrapped up inside of three weeks, but what emerged on screen in 1950 was a revolutionary film, one which captured the essence of the 20th century’s greatest tragedy, poverty, better than virtually any other film before or since.
Pedro and Jaibo are two teens who live in Mexico City’s pestilent urban slums. Jaibo is a vicious, irredeemable creature who enjoys picking on those even less fortunate than himself, while Pedro occasionally betrays a goodness out of place and at odds with his surroundings. One of Jaibo’s favourite targets is a local blind beggar, though he also sets his sights on one of his gang’s younger sister, Mechte.
Olvidados is a brutal film in every sense. It recalls his earlier documentary Land Without Bread, while also showing the influence of Italian neo-realism. It may also be seen as, along with the later The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Buñuel’s most linear film, with none of the surrealistic frissons that characterised his other masterworks. It’s a film that has influenced as much as been influenced by, casting down a marker that other such major works as Pixote, City of God and Amores Perros have tried to match and, in spite of their various merits, never quite succeeded. As the opening narration confirms, it sets out to show real life. It is not optimistic, as the area it depicts merits nothing less – compare it to the phoney Hollywoodised Mexico of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with its child beggars coming across as mere playful urchins, not individual tragedies. There is no room for optimism, as thousands, nay millions, of slum kids around the world, particularly in the Hispanic countries, have been dealt the same Hanged Men by the Tarot cards of fate.
Yet despite this particular relevance to a certain creed, it’s a film that strikes to all our hearts. It could be argued that what Buñuel has done is create a masterpiece of the 20th century’s most prominent art-form to match a masterpiece of the 19th century’s most respected art-form, Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Even the film’s title evokes Dickens’ piece, while the tale has several pointed similarities. The real tragedy, however, is not that these kids are like this, but that they had no chance to be anything but. Poverty is a disease, and those depicted in Buñuel’s film will, as we are told at the beginning, never find benefit from any cure. This is indeed real life, and made all the more so by the naturalness of its lead actors’ performances. Inclan undoubtedly sticks in the memory as the blind beggar, looking faintly like Lee Marvin on a particularly bad bender, yet credit, too, to the youngsters, with young Fuentas a lonely soulful figure as the object of lust, and Cobo dispassionately brutal as Jaibo. Buñuel is also helped immeasurably by master D.P. Figueroa, whose images paint a picture of hell on earth and which stick hard and fast in the memory, of Jaibo’s vicious beating in front of a massive scaffolding structure, of poor Machte’s being left to be raped by Jaibo by her uncaring brother, of the blind beggar being kicked around by the despicable layabouts. And despicable though they are, it would take the hardest of hearts not to feel sympathy for the conditions that have lead to this result. “Almost every capital hides, behind its wealth, poverty-stricken homes where poorly-fed children, deprived of health or school, are doomed to criminality” we are told. Who among us cannot say that Buñuel’s film is just as potent over a half a century on? That in itself is almost reason enough to honour it.
