Él (Spanish: Him; re-issued in the US as This Strange Passion) (1953), by Luis Buñuel, is a Mexican film based upon the novel by Mercedes Pinto. It deals with many themes common to Buñuel’s cinema, including a May–December romance between a woman and her obsessively overprotective bourgeois husband, and touches of surrealism. The film was entered into the 1953 Cannes Film Festival.
Plot
The film opens during a foot washing ceremony in a Christian church where a man named Francisco sees an attractive young woman from across the room. She leaves the church and escapes Francisco, despite his attempt to chase after her. Another day, Francisco finds her again in the church. He works up the courage to speak with her, but she seems uninterested, and insists that they can never speak to each other again. Francisco follows her to a restaurant and sees her meeting with Raul, a close friend of his.
Francisco later meets with Raul, who divulges that he and the young lady, Gloria, are engaged to be married. Francisco conspires to woo Gloria away from Raul by throwing a party and arranging for the couple to attend. When Gloria finds out that Francisco is the host, she seems wary of this ruse, but ultimately falls for his charm and social standing.
The film jumps to the future, where Gloria and Francisco are married, and have been for quite some time. One day, Raul is driving through the city and finds Gloria. As she tells the story to Raul, the film enters a flashback where the first weeks of Gloria and Francisco's marriage are reconstructed. In the flashback, Gloria tells Raul of how horrible her marriage is, because Francisco has turned out to be a jealous, paranoid husband whose socially upright, just appearance falls apart behind closed doors.
Throughout the film, Francisco is in the midst of a lawsuit regarding his property holdings, which causes him considerable duress. For her part, Gloria is frustrated, saddened and ultimately frightened by her husband's treatment. She believes she has always acted innocently and is genuinely surprised by Francisco's accusations, but no one will take her side. Gloria's mother believes Francisco to be a decent man (he is portrayed as an upstanding member of the community), and even their Pastor (Father Velasco) admonishes Gloria for her untoward behavior with other men, and vouches for her husband (while revealing, to Gloria's astonishment, that Francisco had maintained his virginity up until their marriage). After Francisco finds out that she confessed everything to Father Velasco, he shoots her with a revolver loaded with blanks in order to "teach her a lesson." But Gloria tells Raul that Francisco became more caring and forgiving after this episode.
Relations between husband and wife become better for a time, but Francisco's suave veneer continues to fray when he asks Gloria to spend the day with him and takes her to the bellower at the top of a church spire. In a moment of honesty, Francisco finds himself in a misanthropic tirade about the "worms" down below. His rant escalates until he spontaneously begins to strangle Gloria, threatening to throw her over the rail to the sidewalk below to punish her in jealous rage. Gloria pulls herself from danger and runs away. It is only at this point that the flashback comes full circle, and Gloria encounters Raul. After hearing the story, Raul suggests that she leave her husband.
Gloria returns home willingly, but Francisco sees that someone brought her to the house, and demands to know who it was. He is devastated to learn that Gloria had been with Raul. The pattern of Francisco's jealously is unbroken and he contemplates divorce. But he seeks reconciliation after apparently realizing that Gloria has never in fact had an affair. Gloria confesses that "she was confused," but that she had to confide in somebody, and that somebody was Raul. When Francisco realizes that she had told Raul about their marital problems, he regards it as an utter betrayal, and says angrily that he can't forgive her for it.