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Nick Curtis's rating
Brutal poverty still relevant
By
Nick Curtis
15 Feb 2007
Sad to say that, 57 years after it was first condemned as unpatriotic in his adopted homeland, Mexico, Luis Buñuel's study of the brutalising effects of poverty on children has lost little of its relevance.
On first viewing, the film also looks astonishing, given it was shot in 21 days on a shoestring budget, but it's the bluntness of the moral message that really takes you back.
Alfonso Mejia's young Pedro, the product of a rape, is spurned by his exhausted mother and implicated in a petty murder by his older friend Jaibo, but really he was doomed from birth.
The dream sequences in the middle and at the end of the film are still genuinely disturbing, its final image one of heartbreaking desolation.
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