"Ensayo de un Crimen" describes a man that after a childhood experience intimately connected with a music box revels in murder dreams - sex, pleasure and murder being intimately linked: In the time of the Mexican revolution his baby-sitter was killed by a stray bullet in front of him. As she is lying there dead and defenseless, blood running down her throat, going down her thighs, the boy feels deep pleasure and power. All this is punctuated by the sound of a musical box. In the chaos of the times the musical box disappears and these feelings are buried and forgotten. One day, Archibaldo de la Cruz, already a grown man, finds that musical box in a shop and, barely concealing his excitement, buys it and his old dreams come to the surface again.
In the beginning of the film (after a mysterious accident suffered by a nun), he goes to the police station in order to confess a murder and tells the story of his life to the police chief. His life is shown in flashbacks and shows the life he led and the women he met. From now on it is difficult to tell reality from dreams.
Buñuel is a very good actor's director and aptly describes the straight-jacket morality of the time where official marriage is mandatory (for women this is like a prison where the warder is her husband), and the icons of the catholic church are a dominant presence. Here are the essential elements present in the films of Buñuel. Fantasy/ Reality, double-standard morality and the church - the only road to freedom seems surrealism, fantasy overtaking reality.
Buñuel's films are sensuous and full of atmosphere and here as usual reality is not what it seems. Even if he, in his early Mexican films, seems to make concessions to the producers, you will notice under the surface all the themes that obsessed Buñuel and that would come to the foreground in films like "Viridiana", "El Angel Exterminador", "Belle de Jour" etc..
In the beginning of the film (after a mysterious accident suffered by a nun), he goes to the police station in order to confess a murder and tells the story of his life to the police chief. His life is shown in flashbacks and shows the life he led and the women he met. From now on it is difficult to tell reality from dreams.
Buñuel is a very good actor's director and aptly describes the straight-jacket morality of the time where official marriage is mandatory (for women this is like a prison where the warder is her husband), and the icons of the catholic church are a dominant presence. Here are the essential elements present in the films of Buñuel. Fantasy/ Reality, double-standard morality and the church - the only road to freedom seems surrealism, fantasy overtaking reality.
Buñuel's films are sensuous and full of atmosphere and here as usual reality is not what it seems. Even if he, in his early Mexican films, seems to make concessions to the producers, you will notice under the surface all the themes that obsessed Buñuel and that would come to the foreground in films like "Viridiana", "El Angel Exterminador", "Belle de Jour" etc..