Juan Bustillo Oro’s film, Arm in Arm Down the Street (Del brazo y por la calle) (1956) is the story of a young married couple, María and Alberto, who have great dreams, but who live in grinding poverty in the harsh, noisy, industrial neighborhood of Nonoalco / Tlatelolco, which is slowly robbing both of their human dignity and, in the case of María, her sanity. What makes this film unique is the fact that Bustillo Oro uses the Expressionistic techniques he employed in his earlier works of Mexican Expressionism and film noir, to create the sensory conditions of the experience of the living in an industrial part of Mexico City (Tlatelolco) near a huge train terminal and the Nonoalco bridge, and the psychological consequences. María, who hails from a family from the wealthy (and snobbish) Mexican elite, married the impecunious but ambitious artist, Alberto. They are intensely in love, and both have the best of intentions to make their marriage a success. However, the grinding monotony of poverty, the bill collectors, and the invasiveness of the city with its noise, heat, smoke and grime are pushing María into a state of anxiety, despair, and paranoia.
Trapped at home, she comments that “Every day I must endure the only view I have: the terrible human misery that surrounds me: naked children, totally insensate women, men turned into beasts by alcohol, and in all, everyone is hungry” (from Del brazo y por la calle). Alberto’s pride and ambition push him to make rash and ultimately selfish decisions, and above all, make him blind to the consequences of his selfish point of view. The film is emotionally difficult to watch, but as opposed to the films based on plays by Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, Bustillo Oro’s film, like most of the great films from Mexico’s Epoca de Oro del Cinema Mexicano, has a life-affirming ending with a message of hope, strength, and salvation.
While many of Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age films are melodramas, comedies, film noir, or westerns, Arm in Arm Down the Street is an example of Naturalism. In a literary sense, the film is in a direct line of descent from the novels and novellas of the naturalist writers, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and George Gissing in that it shows the inner workings, dreams, contradictions and vulnerabilities of people in a state of relative powerlessness. In the case of George Gissing, his female protagonists are often ones driven by poverty to degrading behaviors; but it shows (as Jane Austen was at pains to always point out), that women had to muzzle themselves with respect to frankness and honesty in order to have any chance whatsoever at survival (aka, a “good match”). Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s female characters also tend to fall to that level as well. Without a “good match,” there was essentially nothing to keep you from falling into a pit; a veritable hell on earth. In that sense, many of the naturalists and sensationalists (Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs. Ellen Wood), are in essence writing cautionary tales about what fate will be befall you if you marry badly. Although they write to question and undermine the practice of “The Season,” there is a sense that they can’t change reality, and so the novels become normative in the sense that they simply equip people with knowledge and a cold-eyed stare at the practice to arm themselves to play the game to win.
Del brazo y por la calle is really no different. While its super-realism / naturalism engenders comprehension and sympathy (and perhaps even self-knowledge) in the viewer, in the end, most viewers will look at María and think, “Look what you could have avoided if you had not been dumb enough to marry an artist!” In terms of the clichés surrounding “artistic temperament,” one can argue that María is even more temperamental than Alberto. He is unflappable. However, that is primarily because he has learned to insulate himself a bit from reality. It is only when reality intrudes does he face his own part in the drama that resulted in such profound alienation and emotional agony for his wife.
MAIN CHARACTERS
Maria Beautiful young woman from a
wealthy family in the Mexican elite
Alberto Poor,
idealistic painter who is passionately in love with María
Mexico City Credited in the credits as the third main actor
SYNOPSIS
Del brazo y por la
calle
the story of María and Alberto, who marry in spite of María’s parents’
exhortations to the contrary. Wealthy
parents never want to see their daughters marry impecunious artists, and it is
even more the case in highly stratified Mexico where social hierarchy has been
so rigidly enforced it amounts to a caste system. But, love will be love, and
all it takes is a little bit of Puck’s pansy juice in the eyes, and the
beautiful society debutante falls in love with the penniless artist who lives
in a noisy apartment that is falling apart at the seams and inhabited by
carousing neighbors and sexual predators. The film is about the how the once
utopian part of the city that housed the hub of President Porfirio Diaz’s
immense railway network evolved into a dystopian, Hephaestian inferno around
the Nonoalco Bridge, and how that environment slowly chipped away the sanity of
the residents. In the end, the strength of their love prevails, but it is not
without deep challenges and introspection. The clanging, shrieking, hoarse-throated
city breaks down, but in doing so, it reveals the gold within.
THEMES
Naturalism in cinema. As perhaps one of the most innovative and daring films of the entire Epoca de Oro del Cine Mexicano (Golden Age of Mexican Cinema), Del brazo y por la calle . Its subtlety and relative obscurity have resulted in the fact that it seems to be an underappreciated film. And yet, there are aspects of the film that make it unique, not only for being an intensely innovative example of Naturalism in cinema that brings in the city itself as perhaps the main protagonist, but for functioning as a time capsule. The film was shot in the Mexico City industrial areas of Nonoalco and Tlatelolco, which, at the time of the filming in 1955, was an industrial area criss-crossed by train tracks and busy elevated bridges and highways. It was an ugly agglomeration of Bauhaus-appearing multi-story stucco buildings, plazas with low-rent businesses (pool halls, etc.), cheap hotels, incessant construction, and pockets of grinding poverty where poor children did not get the nutrition or medical attention they needed. There were also vestiges of the past – a small church dating back to colonial times, constructed over the old Tlatelolco city-state that once rivaled Tenochtitlán. There was also a charming lake, Lake Texcoco, which rivaled Xichimilco, but unlike Xochimilco, Lake Texcoco was drained. It is interesting to note that Bustillo Oro filmed in Nonoalco, the same location as Buñuel’s classic (but immediately banned) film, Los Olvidados (1950) which incorporated the story of juvenile delinquents. The scenes of the trains and the tracks upon which María trips as she returns from the market are reminiscent of Juan Rulfo’s stunning photographs of the trains of Mexico City which he published in 1955. In Rulfo’s photographs, the trains simultaneously evoke the rapid leap to modernity of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency, along with a sense of its impact on people’s ways of surviving against all odds.
Costumbrismo urbano: One can consider Bustillo Oro’s film an
example of “costumbrismo urbano” (to coin a term), because the Tlatelolco of
1956 (as in the case of the pre-Conquest Tlatelolco) no longer exists. Much was
demolished in order to make way for utopian urban projects – a utopia that
never arrived, given that Tlatelolco was the site of a massacre of students by
the military in 1968, and then the site of mass death in 1985 when the
relatively new buildings collapsed during the 1985 massacre.
This is a brief excerpt of the full article by Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.. Click here to read the article with additional details about plot elements, themes, character analysis, illustrative scenes, and review questions.
As
we progress through Mexico City, the camera angles become more pronounced and
the views of Mexico City are askew, suggesting that the city itself can cause
disorientation and alienation.
Alberto
and María kneel inside the small, colonial-era church located in the poor,
industrial Tlotelolco District of Mexico City, where Alberto lives.
Working
by the light from below, María huddles near the skylight, still mending
clothing. She is still on the azotea
(rooftop patio), and in the distance one can see the neon lights, demonstrating
that artifice and human constructions have completely overwhelmed / negated
nature.
María
observes poor children playing in the dirt and trash in her neighborhood of
Nonoalco, just past the train tracks and under the elevated highway bridge. She
notices one boy is disabled. All seem to be hungry. She leaves her paper bag
containing bread for them. “Every day I
must endure the only view I have: the terrible human misery that surrounds me:
naked children, totally insensate women, men turned into beasts by alcohol, and
in all, everyone is hungry.”
The
bridge at Nonoalco where Alberto considers suicide. The chiaroscuro treatment
by Bustillo Oro gives it a feeling of being in an inferno.
Alberto
and María walk hand in hand down the street. They are together, and the sky is
clear. There is very little traffic, and the weather is calm. The viewer has a
sense of optimism and restored balance.
