La Formula Secreta (The Secret Formula, 1965)

This is not an easy film; it's obscure, relatively unknown, and practically impenetrable at first glance. Director Rubén Gámez would go on to make only one more film after this one, and, after seeing this odd, surrealist, confounding opera prima, some may find this fact to be a blessing upon mankind. But I would disagree.

La Formula Secreta is fascinating. It confuses, angers, frustrates, and delights, usually during the same frame. It recalls both the dreamscapes of An Andalusian Dog, and the montage techniques of Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. It is virtually wordless, save for a poem by author Juan Rulfo, and some other smatterings of cryptic narration here and there. There's no story to speak of, and even the individual fragments don't appear to make much sense, which differentiates this movie from something like Tarkovsky's The Mirror, in which the unifying plot may be murky, but the separate fragments are easy-to-follow.

Consider the first scene in the movie; the camera's doing circles around the Zócalo, and on the ground, we see the shadow of a bird - which, I might add, is not exactly convincing. So what does this image mean? Perhaps it has something to do with flying, and being free. But this particular bird keeps doing circles very close to the ground, never really taking off. Is the point, then, to show this animal as trapped, unable to leave its place?

The movie then goes on to portray the lives of several people who are embroiled by their surroundings and/or lifestyles. This suggests that The Secret Formula is about being chained to a state of misery, like the bird that can't rise into the air. Certainly, the next few segments seem to revolve around this theme.

We see a man assembling bags atop a truck. He finds a woman on the ground, and drags her to the truck too. Then he jumps on top of the bags himself, besides the woman. The truck starts going through the freeway. The woman wakes up, and in a matter of seconds, the man and the woman are kissing. Irreverent randomness? Or is this the story of a man escaping his job in search of eternal love?

Then the farmers come in. One of them stands close to the camera, but the camera tries to look away, and pans to the right, and then to the left. But the man, time and again, stubbornly side-steps into the frame again. He will not be ignored. We will hear his plight. The farmers are tired, and they are dying. They lie in piles amidst the crevices of undulating dunes.

And then the film jumps to a schoolyard, and then to a slaughterhouse, and then to the city streets, where a cowboy ropes in a pedestrian as if he was livestock. This is one of several instances in which the film asks us to consider how we would react if humans were treated as cruelly as animals. In an earlier scene, a boy first carries a skinned cow across his back, and then a woman, and then a man. Gámez is playing with "What If" questions here. Like Planet of the Apes, which had humans as the prey of totalitarian apes, this film likewise presents us with a scenario (or really several scenarios) in which we suffer the same fate that we accord to the "lesser species" of the world.

The film ends with a long list of American companies, which appears to be a statement about capitalism; an implication strengthened by the concurrent visual motif that appears throughout the film: the flashed silhouette of a Coca-Cola Bottle. In fact, one of the original titles for this movie was Coca-Cola en la Sangre (Coca-Cola in the Blood), a tid-bit which only reinforces the anti-consumerist undercurrents.

But despite all these varied themes, what one enjoys the most about The Secret Formula, is that it is refreshingly itself. It's a completely different proposition from regular cinema; a proposition which certainly has antecedents (Buñuel, for instance), but which is original nevertheless.