Woman without love

Director Luis Bunuel rated A Woman Without Love his worst film. Churned out in 1952, six years after the Spaniard settled in Mexico, the B&W movie was a commercial project handed to him, a Spanish-language re-make of a decade-old French film, Pierre et Jean, based on a Guy de Maupassant short story.

Two brothers discover that their mother, married young to a boorish antiques dealer, had a secret affair which resulted in the birth of the younger brother. The film shows how the affair happened, and then jumps 20 years to its unveiling and the sons' reactions to their mother and each other.

Bunuel's anti-bourgeois anti-materialist sentiments were inevitably aroused by the melodrama, but this wasn't a setting for his surrealistic stylishness. It was a job, and he moved the leaden plot from scene to scene capably. The only noticeable directorial touch is frequent usage of hip-level camera positions. The acting is mostly at the level of TV soaps.