An excerpt from the booklet essay by Jordi Xifra

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is one of its author’s most brilliant Surrealist comedies. The film can be seen as a parodic reply to the psychoanalytic cycle imposed by Hollywood in the years following the Second World War. The use of ominous music, typical of many mystery films, and the flashback structure, characteristic of the genre, reinforce this classification. The focus of the narrative is the memory and imagination of the narrator-protagonist; hence the blurred boundaries between lived experience and imagination, external reality and subjective vision. Buñuel is already pointing towards the films of his full maturity, such as Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, 1972), in which these boundaries dissolve completely. This formal rupture is accompanied by a subversion of Freudian clichés in commercial cinema of the period: a genuine immersion in in-depth psychology. Its protagonist, Archibaldo, is a Sadean character, almost a personification of the Marquis de Sade himself.

Archibaldo, like so many of Buñuel’s heroes, spends the entire film trying to accomplish something he never manages to carry out. Curiously, he will end up united with Lavinia, the only woman among the many who appear in the film whom he has succeeded in killing, albeit embodied by her mannequin. As Buñuel argued, “Archibaldo is frustrated in certain aspects of his relationship with reality. Almost all of them. Most of my films have that theme: frustration. Bourgeois people who cannot leave a room, people who want to dine but everything prevents them, a man who wants to kill but his crimes fail. Frustration already appears in Un Chien Andalou (1929): the man approaches the woman, but the ropes with objects tied to them prevent his advance. In the garden scene in L’Âge d’Or (1930), the lovers cannot even kiss. It is the distance between desire and reality. To attempt and to fail.”

Killing the other becomes his way of communicating, of contacting the loved and desired being. On the other hand, all his crimes are uncertain, hypothetical - perhaps never carried out, perhaps mere products of objective chance. Buñuel plays delightfully with this ambiguity. In reality, he leaves his character shrouded in mystery and refuses to explain him, because he is interested in the profoundly humorous and liberating nature of his actions in relation to the social context in which they occur. Buñuel does not fall into conformism, and the ending of his film, with Archibaldo walking off towards happiness arm in arm with Lavinia, is one of the most splendid endings in the history of cinema.

“Archibaldo”, Buñuel stated, “wants to kill […] Possibly killing would liberate him from a sexual point of view, but if he were actually to kill, one does not know what he would do next. He is a murderer. But clearly, he also likes frustration; he adores it. He tries to kill one woman and fails. He tries to kill another and fails again. One might say that he wants to fail, in order to try again. Does he do it to liberate himself? Perhaps he does it for the opposite reason. I know this may seem obscure. I am drawn to obscurity in a character. If you try to construct a character too rationally, that character will have no life. There must be a shadowy zone.”

This is a tribute by the filmmaker to one of his favourite authors: the Marquis de Sade. Buñuel, with his particular sense of humour, presents one of his central ideas - the innocence of the imagination - and pays homage to De Sade, who committed crimes only in his imagination.

Jordi Xifra's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.