United States, Mexico, 1984
Directed by John Huston
With Albert Finney (Geoffrey Firmin), Jacqueline Bisset (Yvonne Firmin), Anthony Andrews (Hugh Firmin)

The year is 1938 and this is the Day of the Dead in the small town of Cuernavaca, at the bottom of a couple of volcanoes, deep in the South of Mexico. People are celebrating in their own, traditional, festive, colorful, incredible ways their dead, who are supposed to pay them a visit on that day of the year, a quick tour back in life from their hereafter lives. And touring also the alive and rowdy folks is a man in a tuxedo, wearing sunglasses even if it is well after dark, tight-lipped and stilted. The distinguished man, who is rather tall, clearly stout, perhaps in his 50s, cuts an odd figure among the cemetery, the square, the streets, advertising his foreignness and a touch of precarious health. He walks too gingerly, he acts too slowly, he is too quiet. The few words he tells a stray dog which seems to like him turn out to be his only utterances during all the long time the camera follows him – it is a fairly long sequence, remarkably fluid and as remarkably silent (apart, that is, from the background noise of the revelers) and you wonder when it would end.
To be silent is precisely what his wife would reproach him – and what has caused her to move back even if it seemed she had gone really for good. This accusation of silence is clearly articulated at the end, as Geoffrey Firmin at long last, with too much delay from his own fault, reads the pack of letters she wrote to him weeks after weeks since she left, and that he just stashed away in a jacket’s pocket before losing them in an ill-famed watering hole; the trouble is that he never cared to read these letters and so he did no have to answer them, stoking thus the anger and fear that eventually prompted Yvonne Firmin to go back to Cuernavaca, starting the narrative. This silence is actually his unwillingness to acknowledge he is unable to comprehend the possibility that the bonds between him and his beloved wife can be broken.
Beyond the eccentricities, the antics, the fantasies fueled by his heavy drinking, a display of farcical and pathetic self-destruction creating scenes of scandal and confusion that fascinate and amuse at the same time, there is something gnawing deeper at the retired British consul. Quaffing any beverage is the only way to stand up and keep moving, even if it is rather stumbling and bumbling all around – but the man holds himself physically willy-nilly. Still he is morally wrecked, beyond repair, redemption, hope.
“No se puede vivir sin amor”, One cannot live without love: this is the Spanish sentence that haunts him, cropping up in the dialogues. The bluster and the irony he displays in his upper-class language look like a mask he puts on to stimulate reactions, shocking, spooking or stunning his listeners. But he is obsessed with the loss of his lifetime love, undermined by the distance between him and Yvonne.
The trouble comes from his half-brother, Hugh Firmin. A few scathing words and the intense observation of the wife and the half-brother as they have fun at a fair while he is standing behind a grille, talking to an old friend and drinking, point to the doubts that drive Geoffrey Firmin mad. The fact is that earlier in the film, a few words of Hugh, the embarrassed reaction of Yvonne seem to suggest something did happen between them. The most chilling moment in the film comes when Geoffrey Firmin does speak aloud, in an increasingly shocking rant, venting out his bad feelings, clearly accusing both of having an affair, a harrowing scene where pent-up feelings and terrible suspicions burst on the surface, spoiling definitively the afternoon trip that was supposed to signal a fresh start in the relations between wife and husband. It is telling that the outburst occurs after Hugh, for fun and out of bravura, behaved like a toreador in an arena, wonderfully facing off the bull and winning the admiration of a crowd: the fit, nice, brave, alluring younger man is a walking antithesis to the consul, at least to what Geoffrey Firmin has become. What has barely surfaced, partly wrapped in that deep silence, is his unwillingness to accept he is no longer seducing but older and diminished, another aspect of his rotten core, the slow erosion of his manliness.
Once the rancorous accusation is out, saddening Yvonne and Hugh, the narrative arc swerves to another, tragic direction: Geoffrey takes a bus and goes to that disreputable, filthy watering hole most men would rather advised to avoid. The evening at first gives him a chance to change his mind, when he retrieves the letters. But his weakness and the fate rather send him down the slippery slope in an Armageddon-like atmosphere (thunderstorm and darkness): debasing sex, which brings no comfort to him but, when she finds about it as she tries to bring him back home, drives Yvonne into despair and makes her run away, more alcohol, a dispute with thuggish and far-right militiamen, and death, in the most absurd and dreadful manner. He dies, tellingly, while claiming he is one William Blackstone, frontier man and pioneer, somehow a way to confuse and mock his assailants, a flourish of drunken bravado, and yet an identity harking back to this idle hope of being a stronger, better man, with a golden core, not a rotten core (he has already praised to his neighbor earlier in the film that fantastic figure whose name is a mystery: it is hard to connect this fantasy with the famous British jurisconsult of the 18th century, so perhaps it is a misspelling of the name of a New England settler of the 17th century, William Baxton?).
Hearing the fatal shooting, Yvonne scrambles back along the muddied road to save Geoffrey – but is killed by a rampaging horse. Death is unavoidable and at the last minute reunites those who so tragically parted away. The power of Death over their stories has been asserted from the start, anyway: the titles appear over an elaborate sequence featuring a macabre dance of skeleton-like puppets, the carnivalesque toys that are part of the Mexican folk ritual, the outrageous celebration of the presence of Death (the sequence was shot by the director’s son).
Another visual element also underlines fate’s relentless drive: it is of course the long shot on the couple of volcanoes overlooking the town. They first appear as the background of the caption precising the time and place; then the film cuts into a high angle view of the cemetery where Geoffrey walks into. Mirroring that downward movement, they appear back at the end before the film cuts into a close-up of the face of the dead lead character, stuck in the mud – the downward movement is even steeper, making clear how low his life have ended. Poignantly, the volcanoes had been shot earlier as Geoffrey, Yvonne, and Hugh began their trip, as they were the topic of some romantic remarks by Yvonne, who saw in them a nice symbol of union. Alas, it was not to happen to her and her husband while they were still living.
A toxic, ever-present companion, the role of alcohol is hard to tell: is it compounding the existential malaise of Geoffrey Firmin or is it causing him to be cross and dejected? The film wonderfully conveys the befuddling case of the drunken man whose inebriation does not preclude lucidity, whose wobbling can hide a real resilience, whose fantasies would not prevent him to behave properly, with foolish things sometimes made on purpose (this is the case of the scandal he provokes at the start at a Red Cross gathering, first with the German consul and then with the wider audience – the story, by the way, is fully aware of the unfolding political tragedy of Nazism and far-right aggressiveness). The film’s success owes a lot to the faultless and riveting performance of Albert Finney – John Huston once said that he has rarely directed such a great acting work; but it must be said that Huston has also demonstrated himself a great talent, with a flair for observing and capturing the long fall to hell of a man frightened by failure, loss, and decay, and conveying the inevitable, destructive force of death (it is a film about the intensity of both the unhappy man and the reality of fate, and focusing on that intensity has smartly allowed to give a cinematic translation of the long, richly textured eponymous novel of Malcolm Lowry).