230. Los Olvidados (The Young and The Damned) (1950)

Directed By Luis Bunuel

Synopsis

This kid Jaibo escapes form the correctional facility he was in and comes back to the old neighbourhood to fuck up the life or kill just about everyone there.

Review

A feel good film this ain't. And that makes me feel good. I don't care that much for escapism film, and this one was anything but, it plunges the viewer in with the most unsavoury cast of children and adults, the only characters you could have some sympathy for die violent deaths and it features probably one of the most hateful characters in the history of cinema.

The character of Jaibo is such an albatross that you are really happy when he gets his comeuppance, he is a dark cloud over everyone he meets in the film, but believably so. Actually the whole film is quite believable, even the elements of surreality work in context.

I was a kid not that long ago, I hung out in the street with unsavoury kids, I did bad things to random people, I know what the fuck is happening in this film, I've met these characters and they are so recognisable that it is uncanny. This is more realistic than any Italian neo-relism we've had until now, good going Bunuel. But it isn't comfortable watching.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Thematically, Los Olvidados is similar to Buñuel's earlier Spanish film, Las Hurdes; both films deal with the never-ending cycle of poverty and despair. Los Olvidados, is especially interesting because although “Buñuel employed … elements of Italian neorealism,” a concurrent movement across the Atlantic Ocean marked by “outdoor locations, nonprofessional actors, low budget productions, and a focus on the working classes,” Los Olvidados is not a neorealist film (Fernandez, 42). “Neorealist reality is incomplete, conventional, and above all rational,” Buñuel once wrote in a 1953 essay titled "Poetry and Cinema," “The poetry, the mystery, all that completes and enlarges tangible reality is utterly lacking” (Sklar, 324). Los Olvidados contains such surrealistic shots as when “a boy throws an egg at the camera lens, where it shatters and drips” or a scene in which a boy has a dream in slow-motion (Sklar, 324).

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