La Mort en ce jardin (1956)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

It was towards the end of the Mexican phase of his career that Luis Buñuel directed one of his most lavish productions, a big budget adventure film financed by a consortium of French and Mexican producers.  Adapted from a novel by José-André Lacour, La Mort en ce jardin was Bunuel's second film made in colour, after his first American-backed production, Robinson Crusoe (1954).  With most of the money coming from France, Buñuel had little choice but to cast two big name French actors in the leading roles -Simone Signoret and Charles Vanel - along with Georges Marchal, whom he had worked with on his previous film, Cela s'appelle l'aurore (1956).  Michel Piccoli, at the start of his career and then a virtual unknown, lobbied hard to get the part of Father Lizardi, and in doing so initiated a long professional relationship that blossomed during Buñuel's late period in France, in such films as Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (1964) and Belle de jour (1967).

Whilst La Mort en ce jardin can be enjoyed as a straightforward adventure film, one that begins as a lively Mexican take on the classic Hollywood western and culminates in a darkly compelling survival drama, there is clearly far more to it than that.  It may be painted on a much grander canvas than most of Buñuel's films - filmed entirely on location in Mexico, it is to Buñuel pretty well what The African Queen was to John Huston -  but what it boils down to is a critical and perceptive study in human frailty, where a handful of very different individuals are parachuted into the most Hellish of predicaments so that we may compare their potential for sin and redemption and consider who, if any of them, deserves to survive.

Surface impressions are indeed deceptive and what seems, initially, to be the least typical of Buñuel's films ends up being one that has its author's signature stamped all over it.  Buñuel's penchant for religious symbolism is never out of sight for long but is most apparent in the film's last third, where the action is centred in a Hellish reinterpretation of the Garden of Eden.  A glimpse of a dead serpent covered with jungle ants evokes the shocking image in Buñuel's first film, Un chien andalou (1920) of ants emerging from a hole in a human hand and is an apt visual metaphor for what happens later in the film, when the protagonists plunder the wreck of a crashed aeroplane and end up feasting on the remains of the dead.

In its final act, La Mort en ce jardin transcends its simple survival drama premise and becomes a typically mischievous Buñuelian retelling of the Fall of Man.  Only the pure and those capable of redemption are likely to be spared, the others are surely destined to die in a nightmarish Eden that symbolises the worst of which humanity is capable.  Buñuel denies offering a chance of redemption to the character which bourgeois society would deem to be the worthiest, a young Catholic missionary.  Having broken his faith (in one scene he is prepared to throw pages torn from his Bible onto a fire), Father Lizardi lacks both the moral and physical courage to save the party, and so the mantle of hero is passed to an ostensibly less worthy man, a thuggish adventurer who, of all the male characters, proves to be the only one who is capable of changing for the better.

The fate of the prostitute Djin is sealed almost from the scene in which she first appears, a shallow woman who thinks only of herself and the grubby banknotes she can wheedle out of the men she so evidently despises.  Djin is the most egregious of movie archetypes but Signoret gives her a tragic dimension, and her destruction is all the more poignant since it comes just as she is on the cusp of changing into a better person, offering to commit herself to the one man who is capable of guiding her out of her private Hell.  Her place on the raft out of Paradise Lost is taken by María, the dumb virgin who is the essence of innocence and purity until her eyes alight on the jewels she finds in the crashed plane.  In a typically perverse Buñuelian twist, the fallen woman who might redeem herself is sacrificed in favour of the girl who has no notion of sin, and therefore cannot be redeemed.  She survives simply by virtue of the fact that she is uncorrupted - a barbed taunt at both the conventions of American cinema and those who adhere to a too simplistic view of Christianity.  In his film, Buñuel offers a more reasoned and humane interpretation of Christian philosophy: goodness is not a state of being, it is a process of change.

Film Synopsis

The setting is a small village on the Brazilian border.  An adventurous young man named Shark arrives here at the same time as a party of diamond prospectors who are preparing to attack a small government garrison.  Shark is arrested, accused of robbery, but escapes in the tumult of a full-scale rebellion.  By the time the military forces are back in control, the rebels have all fled to Brazil through the jungle.  The fugitive Shark is now accompanied by Castin, a discredited bar owner, who travels with his deaf and dumb daughter, Maria, and his prostitute mistress, Djin.  Shark's party also includes a young missionary, a soldier and a bandit.  The journey proves to be hazardous, but they know they can never go back.  Will Shark and his allies in adversity ever escape from the jungle or will they fall victim to its many untamed terrors...?