Review by Justin Bateman
Stars Roberto Cobo, Javier Amézcua, Alfonso Mejía, Mário Ramírez | Written by Luis Alcoriza & Luis Buñuel
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 80 minutes | Directed by Luis Buñuel
Translating roughly as ‘the young and the damned’, Los Olvidados stunned audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 and won the Best Director award for Spaniard Luis Buñuel. Set in Mexico, it focuses on the poverty-stricken and disaffected youth, and specifically Pedro and Jaibo. Pedro ostensibly lives with his mother and siblings but he rarely goes home, preferring to spend time with a street gang. When their leader Jaibo escapes from prison, he carries on where he left off, stealing to survive.
Essentially a good kid with a lack of a decent older role model (there is an almost complete lack of them in the entire film, with Ojitos or “Small eyes” who has been abandoned by his father the most obvious example), Pedro at first latches on to Jaibo but soon realises that he doesn’t want anything to do with the older teen’s violent, thoughtless ways. However, after being present at one of Jaibo’s more extreme crimes, Pedro finds himself torn between being labelled a rat and staying on the straight and narrow.
Pre-dating the 2002 Brazilian film Cidade de deus (City of God) by half a century, this has similarly dark themes, with crime as a way of life for young orphans and runaways, all of which stems inevitably from extreme poverty. Los Olvidados is not quite the action thriller that City of God is but is no less shocking for it. Some of the violence is brutal and there is scant regard for human life, made all the more disturbing by the youth of the protagonists.
Buñuel had begun his filmmaking career with Un Chien Andalou (1929), a surrealist short written with close friend Salvador Dali. This was followed a year later by L’Age d’Or, also made with Dali and also surreal. In contrast, Los Olvidados is more social realism than surrealism. However, a couple of dreams hark back to these earlier films and one slow-motion sequence is particularly striking. Looking back now, it almost seems like a template for something David Lynch would later create in both film and television – as the closest we have to a modern surrealist filmmaker, this should probably come as no surprise.
Although very few of the characters in Los Olvidados are entirely sympathetic (even the blind man who is beaten up at the start we later learn is far from innocent himself), it’s tough to watch so many victims being dealt such a miserable hand in life. So while Buñuel offers no solution to the problem, this is nevertheless a powerful and moving piece. It’s perhaps most neatly summarised by the principal of the school where Pedro seems to be finally finding some sort of a future. “If we could lock up poverty instead of children...”
EXTRAS ★★ Just a Derek Malcolm featurette. This 60th anniversary edition of the DVD sees the British film critic providing a brief analysis of the film, interspersed with clips from the feature (13:22).