The Young One

Luis Bunuel - 1960
There is something quite novelistic about this film; it's also excellent, fasinating and clear.
It is quite focussed on the narrative, the many developments (and people do change) that occur. Bunuel uses shots and reverse to coordinate this. Pictorially, I loved the sweating trees and environment of the partly hellish and partly iddylic island, and the focus on the animals. There are a lot of feet and body parts in shot, Bunuel focussing on the passions, again that animalistic side, but also on the draw that bodies have on each other.
This may though be where I most find Bunuel seeing humanity beyond the animal side. Renuncation is key here, who can do it and who can't. The position of the priest is difficult (a huge subject in Bunuel); silly, a bit ineffective, but in a sense a moral arbiter.
It would be wrong to call Bunuel abstract, but I could see how one could do it (saying he's only interested in psychoanalysis). Here he definitively repudiates these claims, making a clear statment of the inequality of race relations; the only hope of an equal relationship in modern society is when the black man has a gun on the white one. There are no dichotomies though, the white man can in a way change, making this oddly optimistic on a personal level, if the society is in no way resolved (as I've said before, surely the only moral position for a social problem film). Desire is constant, the world is in a sense going to hell, but no fatalism; possibility of change amongst the crap.