El (aka This Strange Passion)

I find this to be one of Bunuel's more disappointing endeavors. Not that it's a bad film or even a bad idea, but it seems he made it at the wrong time in his life. It is about an aristocrat who becomes obsessed with a woman he sees in church. He seems level headed, and in fact everyone is convinced that he is normal, but he is a paranoiac. After he marries the woman, he quickly becomes suspicious of everyone. It all culminates in a wonderful scene in church where he thinks that the entire clergy and congregation are maniacally laughing at him. It's a haunting a surreal scene in the most Bunuelian sense of the word. However, this tale of obsession and sexual domination might well have been a masterpiece had he made this film 20 years later, when those became some of his signature themes. In 1952, though, this seems very out of place with the spare and poetic films that represent his period in Mexico. It's a film that he just wasn't ready for yet.