Death in the Garden

I love most of Bunuel's films but "Death In the Garden" is definitely my absolute favorite, ahead of "Los Olvidados," and even "Viridiana." For me, this is as close to perfection as you can get doing 'transcendent realist' or 'transcendent existentialist' cinema (although Bunuel has gotten tagged as a 'surrealist,' most of his '50s work actually has very little to do with that movement and style, and a couple of 'trippy' scenes here and there shouldn't automatically serve to qualify those films in the same boat as "The Exterminating Angel" or "Phantom of Liberty," etc.). To most critics, when they even bother to mention this great film in talking about Bunuel, this is nothing but a 'flawed' film, a commercial chore or 'assignment.' To that I'll have to say: "If only 1 out of a 100 commercial 'chores' ended up as fascinatingly timeless as "Death in the Garden," the cinema would go through a major cultural revival!" The 'flaws' in this film are further aspects of its pefection, if taken in the proper 'absurdist' perspective the film has toward 'reality.' It has its lunatic elements and a few supernatural angles like all Bunuel films, but it also showcases the 'romantic' side of the man too often labeled a pessimist. By 'romantic' I mean, he's managed to fit his auteurist obsessions within a colorful, picturesque film about amoral adventurers in the Amazon jungle who descend into 'the Heart of Darkness.' Also, for one thing, there is some twisted heroism, or 'anti-heroism' going on here. The completely 'amoral' yet not unadmirable Georges Marchal character "Shark" is the closest thing to an Yves Montand/Wages-of-Fear type tough-guy 'hero' Bunuel ever got.

On the surface "Death in the GArden" is a "Wages of Fear" like adventure story (Charles Vanel from Clouzot's masterpiece is one of the main characters) where a bunch of people are put under pressure and forced to work together and survive. The people putting the pressure on are the military fascists not the industrialist-fascists of "Wages of ear." The story happens in a South American state, where a bunch of Diamond miners are being chased out by the corrupt military government. When a small-scale civil war breaks out, the leaders of the rebels become hunted men, and they have to escape by boat, ending up in a rain-soaked amazon jungle trying to get to Brazil. The characters have to cooperate and survive under an increasingly hopeless situation and reveal fascinating aspects of themselves in the process. To incorporate Bunuel's anti-clerical satire, of course, one of them is a Nazarin-like priest, brilliantly portrayed by a very young Michel Piccoli. And like all Bunuel films, there are no moral black and whites to be found anywhere, no stereotypes, but only a dynamically evolving morality shaded in different grays leaning toward the black here, toward the white there, depending on the situation that's being dealt with. You come to have a deep level of sympathy with almost every rogue main character in the film, even Simone Signoret's avaricious Madame, but only after examining them as totally flawed human beings capable of many bizzare deeds, some admirable, others despicable, etc.

Like most of Bunuel's films, "Death in the Garden" gets its main tone , originality, relevance, and philosophical strength from the hilariously absurd farcical scenes that constantly frustrate the action (but not in a totally irrational way as in the later allegorical, surrealist films), a deep identification with religion in order to remain that much more strongly anticlerical, and a complete lack of sentimentality; unlike most other Bunuel, this one has ravishingly beautiful color cinematography (very lush and colorful, almost Renoir-like, Renoir being an obvious favorite of Bunuel's since he not only re-made "Diary of a Chambermaid," but used Zachary Scott from "The Southerner," as his lead actor in "The Young One," his, in some ways Southerner-like foray into and artistic, if not commercial, conquest of American Cinema). Oh yeah! Did I mention the beautiful young deaf girl whose long hair gets stuck in a tree?! What more could you want? This is definitely a MASTERPIECE film that should be transferred to a good DVD as soon as feasible. The Interama video copy uses a scratchy old print, is not letterboxed, and has readable but ugly subtitles; yet, the beauty of this film comes through even in that format.