Word: bunuel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Fuentes's work has also been heavily influenced by motion pictures. A movie trivia expert and a close friend of the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, his most recent play. Orchids in the Moonlight, tells the story of two aging Mexican movie actresses as they struggle to come to terms with their fading stardom...
...take up the simpler but perhaps more moving case first, is a widower, standing on the cusp of old age, living on his late wife's money on a ranch somewhere in Bunuel country. He reads, plays chess against a computer, vigorously conducts the music he plays on his hifi. Sometimes he visits his mistress in Salamanca, more frequently he calls on his only friend, a priest, to chide him with anticlerical chat. He has become less worldly than the good father, and easy prey for Goyita, a 13-year-old schoolgirl (Ana Torrent of Cria), an instinctive siren...
...couple are driven beyond distraction by the bizarre boorishness of the folks next door. For this to work in the movies it must be played either with the film equivalent of Berger's fastidious prose-Ordinary People in apocalyptic dead pan-or with the cauterizing fury of a Bunuel satire. A ham-fisted director like John G. Avildsen (Rocky) need not have applied. Nor were Bill Conti's services required: his score sounds like a Spike Jones symphony of klaxons, sassy trombones, Bronx-cheer kazoos and the Hallelujah Chorus. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd maneuver through this minefield...
...Luis Bunuel and his Work--Carlos Fuentes; Carpenter Center...
this could have been a bitterly raucous movie, if only the artists involved hadn't confused seriousness with solemnity. For their penance, they should see any Bunuel movie ten times. -By Richard Corliss