When most cinema lovers think of Luis Buñuel, they immediately envision the cool, cerebral masterpieces of his late French period. Titles like Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) are etched into film history as the definitive cinematic takedowns of upper-class hypocrisy. However, before he was the toast of the European art house circuit, Buñuel spent nearly two decades in Mexico.
Often dismissed by casual fans as a period of “commercial work” done merely to survive, this era was actually the crucible where his surrealist instincts matured. It was here, working with lower budgets and faster schedules, that Buñuel learned to hide the bomb inside the bouquet. While the French films are polished and detached, the Mexican films are earthy, chaotic, and sweating with obsession. In this vibrant period, he crafted a cinema that was raw, confrontational, and utterly unwilling to comfort the audience.
The Dinner That Won’t End: The Exterminating Angel
The defining masterpiece of this era is the film The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, 1962). It is a direct attack on the social rituals of the elite. The premise is delightfully simple and terrifyingly surreal: a group of wealthy socialites attend a dinner party at a lavish mansion, and when the evening ends, they find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the drawing room.
There are no bars on the doors, no guards, and no physical obstacles; they simply lack the willpower to cross the threshold. As days turn into weeks, the veneer of civilization rots away. The trapped guests smash through walls to access water pipes, practice witchcraft, and eventually descend into savagery, all while wearing tuxedos and evening gowns. Buñuel uses this “impossible situation” to expose the fragility of bourgeois manners. In his later French films, characters can never seem to sit down for dinner; here, they have eaten, but they cannot escape the indigestion of their own decadence.
The film’s claustrophobic nightmare has proven timeless enough to inspire a 2016 opera by Thomas Adès. True to Buñuel’s spirit, the adaptation is a challenging, dissonant work—often described by audiences as “hard to listen to”—capturing the sonic equivalent of a dinner party that has rotted from the inside out.
The Saint on the Pillar: Simon of the Desert
The most eccentric jewel of this period is undoubtedly Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto, 1965). Clocking in at only 45 minutes, it is a strange, truncated masterpiece about Simon Stylites, the ascetic saint who lived atop a pillar for years to prove his devotion to God. The film is a series of temptations, with the devil appearing in various forms (including a woman in a coffin) to lure Simon down.
Central to the film’s hypnotic power is the performance of the lead actor, Claudio Brook. His vocal performance is legendary; he possesses a sonorous, resonant baritone that gives his prayers a profound, almost theatrical gravity.
Brook plays Simon not as a religious zealot, but as a man of immense, if misguided, dignity. His voice serves as the anchor of the film, making the final twist even more jarring. In one of cinema’s great non-endings, the devil transports Simon from his ancient pillar to a noisy, 1960s nightclub. The beautiful Spanish of the saint is suddenly drowned out by the mindless beat of a rock-and-roll dance track called “Radioactive Flesh,” leaving Simon trapped in a modern hell of eternal noise.
Though the setting is radically different, the spiritual struggle persists; the imperative of “get thee behind me” remains relevant even for the pipe-smoking intellectual Simon becomes in the final frame. This leaves the audience with a lingering question: Is the nightclub truly a hell of carnal desire, or is it a reflection of Buñuel himself—an artist transplanted from Spain to Mexico, and finally to France?
Other Essential Works: Poverty, Paranoia, and Failed Saints
Beyond the two famous surrealist pillars above, Buñuel produced several other vital works during this fertile period:
Los Olvidados (1950): The film that resurrected his career. While ostensibly a neorealist look at street gangs in Mexico City, Buñuel infused the poverty with nightmare logic, most famously in a surreal dream sequence involving raw meat and slow-motion levitation.
Él (1953) and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955): These films dive into the dark psychology of the male ego. Él is a harrowing study of bourgeois paranoia that Jacques Lacan famously used for teaching, while Archibaldo is a pitch-black comedy about a man who wants to be a serial killer but whose victims keep dying by accident before he can strike.
Nazarín (1959): A spiritual film following a humble priest trying to live strictly by Christ’s teachings. In true Buñuel fashion, his absolute piety leads only to disaster and suffering, reinforcing the director’s cynical view that true holiness is dangerous in a corrupt world.
The Bridge to Europe: Viridiana and the Return
The polished French masterpieces were not a departure from his Mexican period, but a refinement of it. The critical bridge between these two worlds was Viridiana (1961). Although filmed in Spain (marking his controversial return to Franco’s country), it was produced by his Mexican team, led by Gustavo Alatriste, and carried the ferocious DNA of his Mexican work.
Viridiana took the themes of Nazarín—the failure of Christian charity—and exploded them on a European stage. The film’s centerpiece, a beggars’ banquet that devolves into a drunken orgy posing as Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, was pure Mexican-era provocation. This film proved that the “wildness” he cultivated in Mexico could be exported. It paved the way for the themes of confinement seen in The Exterminating Angel to evolve into the frustrated interruptions of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. In Mexico, Buñuel learned to be a commercial filmmaker who could subvert the system from within; Viridiana was the moment he brought that dangerous skill back across the Atlantic.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Buñuel’s Mexican period was far more than a hiatus; it was the laboratory where his surrealism matured from youthful provocation into a sustained critique of contemporary society. By fusing the surreal with the tangible grit of Latin American life, he created a unique cinematic language where the miraculous and the mundane coexist in uneasy tension. To understand the polished master of The Discreet Charm, one must first reckon with the rougher, wilder artist of Mexico.