THE YOUNG ONE
**** (Masterpiece) Directed by Luis Bunuel Written by “H.B. Addis” (Hugo Butler) and Bunuel With Zachary Scott, Bernie Hamilton, Key Meersman, Crahan Denton, and Claudio Brook.
Ever since I first saw The Young One, in Paris in the late 60s, I’ve never been able to accept the public consensus. The film has been all but written out of film history–accorded scant attention in most studies of Bunuel, and even less notice elsewhere. Very few people seem aware that it exists. At the same time, it’s impossible to imagine a time when such a movie could ever become fashionable. Apparently simple, it’s riddled with dark ironies and subtle ambiguities, and the surrealist high jinks that were Bunuel’s calling card at the very beginning and end of his career–most often figuring as signature interludes in his Mexican pictures–are nowhere in evidence.
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Now Facets Multimedia is showing a new 35-millimeter print, recently released by Milestone Films, Saturday through Thursday, and you can judge for yourself. The Young One doesn’t have the immediate impact or legibility of Bunuel’s best-known works, and though it never fundamentally betrays Bunuel’s leftist convictions, it confounds so many workaday rules of political correctness–left and right, then and now–that no one could ever see it as any sort of tract. Bunuel has rightly called it one of his most personal projects, and it also happens to be one of the most pungent films about the American south ever made–though it was shot in its entirety in Mexico. One of his most sensual, sheerly physical works, it never qualifies as either pornography or sensationalism (though it was probably marketed as both), and its black comedy has a moral complexity typical of his finest work: the film refuses to label any of its five characters as a hero or villain. To quote Bunuel again, “This refusal of Manicheism was probably the major reason for the film’s commercial failure.”
Several more tense confrontations and power shifts between Traver and Miller follow, complicated by the presence of Evvie; the object of Miller’s growing lust and Traver’s casual ally, she’s innocent of sexuality and racism alike. (And unlike Lolita’s, her innocence can’t be taken for flirtatiousness.) After Traver agrees to work temporarily as a handyman for Miller in return for board while he repairs the boat, he spends the night in Pee-Wee’s cabin, causing Evvie to move to Miller’s shack and thereby enabling Miller to consummate his lustful designs on her. Things are complicated still further by the arrival from town of a Protestant preacher (Claudio Brook) and Miller’s boatman Jackson (Crahan Denton), who discover at about the same time that Traver is fleeing from a rape charge and that Miller raped Evvie the night before.
Approached superficially and ungenerously, The Young One might at first seem like a bad imitation of Tobacco Road; if one confuses its deceptive simplicity with simplemindedness, as some viewers have, it might even come across as camp. “How old are you?” Miller asks Evvie after noting that she’s starting to blossom physically. “I use t’know when Mom was alive, befo Gramps brot me out here,” Meersman replies in a delivery so flat as to make her seem not so much a bad actress as a nonactress. (Bunuel reported having so many difficulties directing her that he almost closed down the production, but in fact Meersman’s vibrantly unpolished presence turns out to be one of the movie’s clearest and sturdiest triumphs.) “You know,” Miller says, preparing to grasp her thigh, “they tell the age of a horse by his teeth, but with a woman or a hawg, it’s flesh and weight that counts.”
