By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Los Olvidados' lost boys: DBC Pierre considers
As a print of Los Olvidados (aka The Forgotten Ones; The Young and the Damned) opens in London for a month’s run in the National Film Theatre’s Buñuel retrospective, Booker Prize-winning novelist DBC Pierre, who grew up in Mexico City, considers its impact in the Observer: “I was raised behind walls in Mexico City, but still ran the streets like a rat part-time, a beady-eyed troll among big-eyed statuettes glazed in snot. Coming from an affluent place, it doesn’t take many street beggars to thrust you into a moral crisis trying to rationalise wealth. If a mother begging with a dead baby in her arms doesn’t do it, the knowledge that her kin might also borrow the body for begging will… Surrealist director Luis Buñuel was the instrument it took to publicly articulate the truth about poverty in that city, that absence of love. When he came to live in Mexico City in the late 1940s, it was nearly 20 years since he had filmed his scathing Land Without Bread, amid what he saw as the peasantry’s filth and stupidity in his native Spain. It was as if the energy behind his art, already frustrated by years in exile, even after an extravagant start alongside Salvador Dalí, took the collision with Mexico’s Federal District as a challenge to his very ethos. The result was an explosion captured in a masterpiece of cinema… Los Olvidados took barely three weeks to make in 1950 on a shoestring budget, but hit the world screen like a fist through plate glass. Mexican officials of the day were rabid, critics stunned, and the work won Buñuel the prize for best director at Cannes the following year.” A key insight: “Despite not being one of Buñuel’s surreal works, its framework provided a vehicle for some of his most striking visual effects. After all, where does a surrealist turn when the cruelty he wishes to depict has itself reached surreal depths? Realism. He simply screamed a truth.” [A closer reading at the link.]