A Woman Without Love
Studio: Facets
WorkNameSort: Woman Without Love, A
It’s hard to believe this unimaginative chatfest was directed by the greatest Spanish filmmaker in cinematic history. Luis Buñuel made A Woman Without Love in his prolific but generally undervalued ’50s period, directing with the ambition of a clock-puncher picking up his check and moving on to the next assignment. Based on a Guy de Maupassant short story, the film centers on a housewife, mired in a loveless marriage to an older man, who falls in love with a kind engineer. Her husband’s sudden illness requires her to end the affair, not knowing her impregnation by her lover would come back to bless – and haunt – her in flash-forward 20 years later. Though writer Jaime Salvador’s dialogue is stilted, there is something to be said here about the double standard in society’s condemnation of female infidelity, but the execution is such a staid bore that any hint of Buñuel’s usually deft bourgeois criticism is buried in bland studio formality.
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2007.