Twenty years after his scandalous surrealist masterpieces, Luis Buñuel again outraged with this lacerating portrait of Mexico City’s street kids. Drawing from first-hand accounts, Buñuel follows swaggering hoodlum Jaibo, who escapes from juvenile detention and enlists the wide-eyed Pedro to help find the grass who put him there.
Shot quickly on a shoestring, the results hark to the neorealist films of the day, but Buñuel has no time for their occasional sentimentality – the poor here are not ennobled by poverty, but predatory, robbing even the crippled and blind, and driven like anyone else by their animalistic urges. With its monochrome photography by the great Gabriel Figueroa now restored to its luminous glory, Buñuel’s ‘social-surrealist’ landmark is a primal howl of a film – once seen, never forgotten.
