Review of The Young and the Damned (1950) by Kevin N — 11 Apr 2009

A gritty social drama which works in both a neorealistic manner and in a deeply personal surrealist fashion. The images on screen always seem like part of a documentary; the disturbing violence which fills the film works so naturally as a commentary on what murder means to us as spectators and what it means to the children who commit it here.

There is no doubt of the effects it has: Jaibo's monsterous rage and desensitization works an opposition on us, and the toll that violence takes on little Pedro is also a heavy burden for us. Though this is presented mostly as a straightforward narrtive, Bunuel uses his surrealist touch to make dreams integral to feeling and symbols key to our understanding of the themes.

Chickens are particularly recurring as a metaphor for weakness, and some of the most frightening scenes seem to take root around the naive animals. The most affecting scene in the film may be the last; a boy is animalized as the subject of a tragic act of maliciousness and the sequence is framed to be an identicle match of a similar one in the director's early documentary, 'Las Hurdes'.

There are no compromises taken; sexual desire is handled in a barbarically fetishistic manner and motifs of cruelty flood the film's reels and corrupt us seemingly directly. This is an unflinching masterpiece from one of the art form's most provocative visionaries.