02 · 10 · 23

DEL BRAZO Y POR LA CALLE: a love story doomed to failure

Rafael Aviña

Made in the final stage of Juan Bustillo Oro's career, which coincided with a series of dark and hopeless crime and social plots, very different from the successful theatrical comedies of his first period, Del brazo y por la calle (1955) is an intense noir drama and a sort of love story doomed to failure, showing the city as just another character and its protagonists as beings unable to escape a brutal fate, obsessed with a past prone to melancholy. The film is a rarity in our cinema: Marga López, Manolo Fábregas and Mexico City as protagonist (within the titles themselves), the voice of narrator Carlos Ortigoza without credit, plus a handful of extras and incidental characters are the only actors in a dramatic film, whose theme is poverty, redemption, hope and contained violence, which opens with nighttime images of Juarez Avenue, the Palace de Bellas Artes, the Guardiola building on Madero Street, to move us to Puente de Alvarado, the Jena Restaurant, and from there to the zone of abandonment in Nonoalco: Buenavista, the train station and its mythical bridge.

Adapted by Bustillo Oro himself and Antonio Helú, a writer of crime literature and an interesting filmmaker, Del brazo y por la calle is a film adaptation of a play by Chilean Armando Mook, staged in the Mexican theater in the early 1940s, starring Fernando Soler and María Teresa Montoya. The story is simple and complex at the same time: an incipient marriage moves forward relying only on their affection; she, María (Marga López), is a girl who has left behind all the comforts of her wealthy family who completely rejects her engagement to a young man who does not belong to her social class and, for that reason, her parents break up with the couple. He, Alberto (Manolo Fábregas), is an artist; an aspiring painter who has given up art to become a frustrated, exploited and underpaid employee of an advertising agency, making vulgar and superficial sketches.

Mexico City and, in particular, Nonoalco, become the third emotional character that witnesses its crisis, its fall and its possible salvation. All this, under an impressive photography full of chiaroscuro by Ezequiel Carrasco, who takes to extremes the poorly lit streets, the night scenes, the twilight and the vibrant city, the artificial setting of the house, the rooftop, the distant lights of the city and, in particular and in a masterful way, that scene in which the characters are separated by the bridge of Nonoalco and can not find themselves in the emotional morass in which they live.

The couple lives day by day in a “corner near heaven”, surrounded by an aggressive visual and above all sonorous environment that serves as a lullaby: the noise of the Nonoalco railroad yard, the roar of the wheels and the whistles of the trains, a dripping water faucet and the noise caused by a neighbor's workshop. Fed up, the poverty of the neighborhood, the frustrating married life, naivety and alcohol lead Maria to commit a forced adultery. He, for his part, returns from his night shift and does not find her. The scenes of Fábregas at the top of the Nonoalco bridge during the early morning hours waiting for his wife are memorable. She hesitates between committing suicide or returning to her husband's side. They wander the streets until they finally meet again at home and she confesses the truth. The confrontation is bitter, they argue in the course of that night to return to the daily routine and finally escape arm in arm and down the street.

The couple decides to forget and has apparently forgiven each other, in the limits of a realistic and disturbing film with an emotional and beautiful score by Raúl Lavista, a musical theme composed by Mario Ruiz Armengol, performed by the great Pedro Vargas, and a complex atmosphere of social and dramatic black series as a mirror of another remarkable film: A la sombra del puente (1946), by Roberto Gavaldón, made almost a decade earlier.

Translated by Adrik Díaz