Robinson Crusoe

A deceptively simple adaptation of Defoe's classic desert island novel. Few strikingly surrealist flourishes here: brief dreams of guilt, sexual frustration, and cruel power. Rather, Defoe's caustic analysis of mankind's foibles is translated into a moving account of one man's moral rebirth. The isolation and hardships that befall the bourgeois Crusoe, previously so dependent on servants for survival, leave him faithless, fearful for his sanity, and forced to become his own God, feeding insects and despairing of salvation. But with Friday's arrival, his ideas of religion and civilisation's hierarchy are really put to the test: trust, equality, and mercy replace the master-servant relationship as the necessary conditions of companionship and contentment. As in his other films, irony and a refusal to indulge in sentimentality are the hallmarks of Buñuel's vision; but the overwhelming impression here is one of surprising warmth, proof that, whatever humanity's faults, he remained forever interested in his own species and ultimately sympathetic to them.