Cela s'appelle l'aurore (1956)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

Luis Buñuel was not only a great cineaste, he was also a great humanist, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his socially conscious melodrama Cela s'appelle l'aurore (a.k.a. This is Called Dawn).  Less strident and far less provocative that the director's earlier social drama, Los Olvidados (1950), a scathing critique of Mexico's poor, this mid-period Buñuel conscience-stirrer resounds with the anti-bourgeois sentiment of his subsequent films but does so with an uncharacteristic degree of compassion and emotional involvement.  Even those familiar with this most hard to pin down of filmmakers will be struck by the human face that Buñuel shows us in this little known and under-appreciated film of his, one that was among his personal favourites.

It was the success of films such as Los Olvidados (1950) and Él (1953), made by Buñuel during his 'exile' in Mexico, that raised his international profile and gave him the opportunity to take on big budget co-productions for a global market, beginning with Robinson Crusoe (1954), his first colour film.  Cela s'appelle l'aurore came soon after, a Franco-Italian production filmed on the island of Corsica, Buñuel's first French film since his surreal tour de force L'Âge d'or (1930). The avant-garde writer Jean Genet was originally commissioned to adapt Emmanuel Roblès's best selling novel, but when he failed to deliver the script he was replaced by Jean Ferry.  As Raymond Durgnat ventures in his illuminating book Luis Buñuel (1968), the film forms a trilogy with La Mort en ce jardin (1956) and La Fièvre monte à El Pao (1959) examining the morality of armed revolution.

The central character in the film, Dr Valerio (sympathetically played by Georges Marchal), is evidently one with whom Buñuel could readily identify - a man who turns his back on his own class and, having grown contemptuous of bourgeois attitudes, lends his sympathies to the struggling and oppressed poor.  Valerio is considered a saint by those he helps and an idealistic fool (a Don Quixote) by his social equals, but he is neither of these things.  He is, like Buñuel, a comfortably well off professional who is torn between two natural human impulses, his desire to help others set against an equally powerful desire to safeguard his own self-interest.  He imagines he is a free man, a revolutionary in waiting, but his actions are always restricted by the bourgeois mindset to which he is forever chained.

Valerio's lack of moral fibre is first apparent when he fails to bring himself to leave his wife and commit himself to his new lover, the socially inferior Clara.  He'd rather content himself with the usual bourgeois compromise of a ménage à trois than risk a divorce that would ruin his social standing.  Likewise, his attempts to help the unfortunate Sandro are just as half-hearted and it his inept intervention that seals the poor man's fate.  Valerio does earn a partial redemption - by sheltering Sandro he takes an active stand against an unjust and uncaring régime, and in doing so destroys his marriage - but his reputation survives and he avoids being sanctioned for his 'crime'.  The stench of bourgeois conformity still clings to him, even if he is no longer taken in by the discrete charm of the bourgeoisie.

Even though Cela s'appelle l'aurore is the most conventional of Buñuel's films (which could partly explain its comparative obscurity), examples of Buñuellian mischief and symbolism are not hard to come by.  In one scene, Valerio offers Clara a baby tortoise as a token of his love; as he gets into a clinch with his lover, he lets the tortoise drop to the floor on its back and we are forced to watch the poor reptile as it rights itself - a metaphor for what happens to Valerio as he struggles to gain his moral bearings in the rest of the film.  On the wall of Valerio's living quarters we frequently glimpse a strange portrait of Christ, the bloody visage connected to telegraph wires like some kind of weird telephone.  And when we first encounter Commissioner Fasaro (the supposed guardian of bourgeois order), he is seated at a desk on which a thick volume of work by the spiritualist poet Paul Claudel is placed next to an imposing pair of handcuffs.  As is quaintly typical of Buñuel, the most loathsome bourgeois characters (Gorzone and his punchbag lackey) are portrayed in a slightly comedic vein, not so much outright villains as objects of ridicule.

Few of Luis Buñuel's films are quite what they first seem to be, and whilst Cela s'appelle l'aurore does its best to resemble a bog standard 1950s melodrama, it is not too hard to detect the undercurrents of comedy that run through the film.  The scene in which Sandro 'executes' Gorzone at a social gathering is more farcical than dramatic and carries more than a vague impression of the director's surreal assaults on the bourgeoisie, in such film as El ángel exterminador (1962) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974).  Buñuel's far from subtle imitation of Italian neo-realism (which is only apparent in those sequences depicting the island's poor) has a distinctly glib, if not sarcastic, edge to it - almost as if the director is mocking his well-heeled Italian peers for over-dramatising the misery of Europe's post-war poor.  As much in the subject of the film as in Buñuel's approach to it, Cela s'appelle l'aurore feels like a mischievous gibe at the failure of the bourgeoisie to assume its moral responsibilities and engage fully with the problems of the poor.

Film Synopsis

Despite his bourgeois origins, Dr Valerio devotes himself to treating the poor on an island in the Mediterranean.  His wife Angela leaves him to spend time with her family in Nice, having failed to persuade him to pursue a more lucrative career serving the idle rich in the south of France.  Far from being upset by his wife' departure, Dr Valerio is soon pursuing a clandestine love affair with one of the islanders, Clara.  Among the patients that Dr Valerio attentively cares for is Magda, the tubercular wife of an impoverished labourer Sandro Galli.  Concern for his bedridden wife leads Sandro to neglect his work maintaining the estate where he lives for his boss Gorzone.  The owner of a factory that employs most of the people in the region, Gorzone has no sympathy for Sandro and dismisses him, insisting that he and his wife leave their house immediately.  Magda dies when Sandro attempts to transport her to hospital and the desolate husband takes his revenge by shooting dead Gorzone as he hosts a party at his house.  Feeling responsible for what has happened to Sandro, Dr Valerio offers him sanctuary and arranges to help his escape to the mainland.  It proves to be a futile gesture...