Mexico's Blond Tigress - Rosita Quintana

For those of you looking for great Christmas and/or Hannukah gift ideas, check out these recent DVD releases, as recommended by the NY Times website.

The recommendations feature a prominent filmmaker from Mexico's Golden Age of Cinema, and a more contemporary figure that recently shed light on our very own Inland Empire.

Happy Holidays to all! Feliz Navidad!

New DVDs - New York Times

Luis Buñuel is categorized with the likes of Truffaut and Fellini as a pillar of the art-film establishment of the 1960s and ’70s. But before Buñuel returned to Europe, to make late career masterpieces like “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “Tristana,” he spent almost 20 years in Mexico, working on films that ranged from popular genre pictures to thorny personal projects.
His best movies from the Mexican period blend those two extremes, to the point where a film like “Susana” (1951) could both please matinee audiences with its rip-roaring melodrama and enchant more skeptical viewers with its bizarre imagery, acidic social observation and casual subversion of cherished values.

“Susana” is the third Mexican Buñuel film to come out on the Cinemateca label in the last few months, joining “A Woman Without Love” (1952) and “The Brute” (1953). “Susana” and “The Brute” both fall into what has been retrospectively labeled the “bad girl” genre, a subset of film noir driven by female characters with outsize ids. (Hollywood examples would include Orson Welles’s 1947 “Lady From Shanghai” and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 “Gun Crazy.”)

The title character of “Susana” is what advertising of the time would probably have referred to as a “blond tigress,” a voluptuous, man-eating reform school girl (Rosita Quintana), introduced on a dark and stormy night as uniformed attendants toss her into solitary confinement. Moonlight streams through a barred window, casting the shadow of a cross on the floor of her cell (otherwise populated by a Buñuelian menagerie of bats, rats and scurrying insects). She calls upon God (“You made me the way I am!”) to release her into the world, and when she shakes the bars of the window, they miraculously come loose.
After crawling through the mud like a snake, this temptress makes her way to the Edenic ranch of Don Guadalupe (Fernando Soler), where she goes to work not only on the kindly patron, but also on his naïve son Alberto (Luis López Somoza) and his brawny foreman Jesus (Victor Manuel Mendoza). But as crafty as Susana may be, she can’t fool the hacienda’s salt-of-the-earth housekeeper (María Gentil Arcos), whose simple folk wisdom is inextricably intertwined, at least in Buñuel’s eyes, with no small measure of ignorance and intolerance.

Buñuel creates a perfect sense of Brechtian alienation out of his self-conscious use of clichés (from horror movies and the ranchero musical, two of Mexico’s most popular genres) and his distanced, presentational visual style. (The camera stands at a measured interval from the characters, and there is little of the cross-cutting that classical Hollywood uses to knit the viewer into the scene.) Yet Latin American viewers of the time seem to have understood “Susana” as an unproblematic melodrama, at much the same moment North Americans were embracing the chillingly ironic soap operas of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) as standard-issue tear-jerkers. In such ways do wily artists survive the pressures of the marketplace. (Cinemateca/Facets Video, $24.95, not rated)

TWIN PEAKS

One of Buñuel’s Mexican films was “Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1954), starring Dan O’Herlihy, an Irish actor with a resonant stage voice who also appears in six episodes of “Twin Peaks,” the cult television show created by Mark Frost and David Lynch. Mr. O’Herlihy is one of the few real connections between Buñuel and Mr. Lynch, directors who are inevitably coupled as fellow surrealists, though in most respects their work is widely divergent.

Buñuel was among the most sober of filmmakers, who after the youthful experiments of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929) and “L’Age d’Or” (1930), burrowed into a dispassionate depiction of the material world, the better to uncover its hidden irrationality. Mr. Lynch remains a besotted fantasist, building his giddy daydreams from the ground up.

Paramount Home Video has finally been able to gather the scattered elements of “Twin Peaks” into a single, handsomely produced set the company is calling the “Definitive Gold Box Edition.” All 29 episodes and the original pilot are here, following the F.B.I. agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he tries to solve the murder of a high school girl, Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), in the small Washington State community of the title.

Remastered from previous releases, the film has an impeccable presentation, with crisp images that preserve the series’s odd (and, eventually, thematically significant) reddish tinge, and a new five-channel stereo remix that enhances Mr. Lynch’s typically careful sound design. The broadcast version of the pilot, long unavailable because of rights issues, is here, as is the European release with a different ending, which brings the mystery to a radically premature conclusion.

“Twin Peaks” was a sensation during its first season on ABC (it had its premiere in April 1990) and a bust during its second (1990-91), a decline that Mr. Lynch, in a documentary appended here, attributes to ABC’s insistence that Laura Palmer’s murder be solved. But in reviewing the course of the series, it seems plain that it slowly slipped from the control of its creators, devolving from tight little enigmas (what is that elk’s head doing on the conference room table?) and deadpan delivery into broadly played comedy of the most traditional, television sort: the Miss Twin Peaks contest, for example, with David Lander (Squiggy of “Laverne and Shirley”) as host. Slowly, your suspicion mounts that there is no underlying concept. One non sequitur follows another, leading inexorably to the moment when there is no choice but to bring on a dancing dwarf.