A Woman Without Love (1952)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

Luis Buñuel followed up to his internationally acclaimed hard-hitting social drama Los Olvidados (1950) with a series of comparatively low-key works for a Mexican audience, of which A Woman Without Love (a.k.a. Una mujer sin amor) is one of the least known and most underrated.  For a director who is renowned for his iconoclastic approach to cinema, A Woman Without Love is a surprisingly conventional melodrama, which the director would later describe as his worst film.  Whilst the film is certainly not one of Buñuel's most memorable - it has none of the surrealist flourishes and dark anti-establishment humour that we associate with the director - it is nonetheless an engaging, technically impressive piece, one that functions as a fairly uncompromising critique of bourgeois Mexican society. 

The film is based on Guy de Maupassant's popular novella Pierre et Jean, which had previously been adapted by French filmmaker André Cayatte in 1943.  Buñuel's original brief when he was hired to direct the film was to deliver a shot-by-shot remake of Cayatte's film, although Buñuel wisely went against the wishes of his producers and gave the film his own interpretation, which is noticeably bleaker than Cayatte's.  The film's unceasingly sombre tone, achieved by some atmospheric lighting and a suitably menacing score, gives it the aura of a film noir, the tension building to a denoument that is startling in its intensity and poignancy.

In almost every department, A Woman Without Love matches the quality of comparable melodramas coming out of Hollywood at the time (films that were pejoratively referred to as 'women's pictures').  Not only is the film very well-directed and well-written, it is exceptionally well-cast, and you struggle to comprehend just why Buñuel disliked it so much.  The Argentinean born actress Rosario Granados (who had previously starred in Buñuel's El gran calavera) gives a stunning performance as the unfortunate heroine who is both a victim of circumstances and a prisoner of her husband's hypocritical bourgeois mindset.   It is through the suffering experienced so visibly by Granados's character that the director manages to express his contempt for the status-obsessed middleclasses.

Granados portrays her character's relentless martyrdom with commendable restraint and finesse - so intensely does she compel us to her identify with her that we cannot help loathing her male tormenters - the husband who controls and exploits her, the lover who abandons her and the son who callously rejects her.  Joaquin Cordero and Xavier Loyá both turn in creditable performances as the two sons, the former's intense, brooding persona making an effective contrast with the latter's natural air of innocence and amiability.  Cordero would later star in Buñuel's The River and Death (1955);  Loya had already featured in the director's La Hija del engaño (1951) and would subsequently appear in The Exterminating Angel (1962), unquestionably the greatest film of Buñuel's Mexican period.  A Woman Without Love may appear slight compared with this surreal masterpiece but it is far too good to overlook.

Film Synopsis

Don Carlos Montero is a successful antiques dealer in Mexico.  He is proud of his position in society and he governs his wife Rosario and young son Carlitos with an iron hand.  After he has been reprimanded by his father for stealing, Carlitos runs away from home and meets a kind engineer in the forests nearby.  The engineer, Julio Mistral, returns the boy to his parents and becomes a close friend of Rosario.  Without her husband's knowledge, Rosario begins a passionate love affair with Mistral, but she is forced to end the relationship when Montero's health takes a sudden turn for the worse.  Twenty years later, Montero's two grown-up sons have just graduated from medical school.  With money provided by their father, Carlitos and his younger brother Miguel plan to found a modern health clinic.  However, the scheme falls through when Montero finds another use for his money.  Coincidentally, this is the moment at which Miguel learns he has inherited a fortune from Julio Mistral, a man he has never met.  Carlitos rejects Miguel's offer to fund his dream project with his windfall and becomes consumed with envy.  It isn't long before he deduces the truth about the mysterious benefactor.  There can only be one reason why Mistral left his entire estate to Miguel...