The Young One–La Joven (1960)

Directed by: Luis Buñuel | 95 minutes | drama | Actors: Zachary Scott, Bernie Hamilton, Key Meersman, Crahan Denton, Claudio Brook

‘The Young One’ (‘La joven’) is an exciting film. Not because it’s necessarily a thriller, but because it’s about a man who wants to get off an island, but can’t get it done. Several things hold him back: the beauty and innocence of a Lolita-esque girl (Key Meersman, who played one more role after this film and then apparently disappeared from the face of the earth), his subservient nature and survival instinct and perhaps a glimpse of hope for peace and acceptance. On the mainland of America he is not sure of his life and the island may be a prison, it could also be his salvation. Yet as a viewer you feel something all the time: don’t do it, rather just leave.

This story is an indictment of ‘casual’ racism. For the grown men in the film, except for the cleric, it’s common to call a black man a “nigger” and see him as something other than a “real person.” In the American South, someone like this fleeing clarinetist is doomed if a white woman accuses him of rape, the chance of a fair hearing is nil, because no one is interested in the opinion of an ‘inferior animal’.

Fortunately, Buñuel does not portray the jazz musician as an innocent sweetheart, that would be too easy. He does stand up for himself and does not shy away from cheating others with a gun and is clearly dyed in the wool, although he seems a bit better educated than his white counterparts. If, by the way, it turns out that he has been in the army and the man who is attacking him in the first place too, there seems to be some softening in their relationship, although the difference remains white versus black.

Buñuel, who again contributed to the script, creates a layered film in which judgments are obvious, but in the end the nuance wins out and the viewer is left with a confused feeling. Because despite the fact that he does not shy away from controversy, nobody in this film, as in other works by the director, is completely right and that is exactly what makes Buñuel’s films so fascinating: it is always the imperfect human being and his clumsiness. who reigns. After all, isn’t racism just a persistent expression of fear through ignorance?

All this was filmed in the usual, realistic and down-to-earth reportage style, which leaves no room for more than the story and the message. Still, it all looks beautiful now. The black-and-white images and the compositions that Buñuel creates with these are here and there reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa (‘7 Samourai’, ‘Rashomon’, ‘Yojimbo’ from the fifties and sixties), although the resemblance to the Japanese greatness is still mostly lies in the fact that both Kurosawa and Buñuel excelled at portraying humanity in both its beauty and casual horror.