A Man Shouldn't Be Alone (1973)

Title		No es bueno que el hombre esté solo
Origin		Spain, 1973
Genre		Drama: Black comedy
Director		Pedro Olea
Starring		José Luis López Vázquez, Carmen Sevilla, Helga Liné
Music		Alfonso G. Santisteban
Blurb		-

Kissing his wife goodbye, a smartly dressed man of middle years carefully bolts the door of his fine but shuttered-windowed shoreside house and makes his way to work. He is a successful manager at a ship-breaking yard, but from his demeanour not a happy one. In the office he fields awkward enquiries about the health of his wife from his attractive young secretary, and distractedly runs his eyes over her elaborately stockinged legs. It's another cold, melancholy morning for Martin Friere.

Are we seeing the symptoms of just another mid-life crisis? Perhaps we are to witness the eccentric breakdown and other "very odd" behaviour of a counterpart to Reginald Iolanthe Perrin? It's true that Don Martin has a secret, and no ordinary secret either.

This mordant black comedy is very much in the mainstream of cinema and a cut above the other sleazy offerings reviewed here. It stars one of Spain's leading comic actors José Luis López Vázquez, best remembered in the English-speaking world for his imprisonment inside a phone box in the legendary short La cabina. And he's got himself into a pretty bad fix in this title too.

Back to Martin's secret. His beloved wife Elena is in fact nothing more than a life-sized doll. Which is not necessarily a problem, as long as he keeps that part of his life to himself. But a man of Don Martin's standing can't afford to ignore the social side of things. His superiors at work are anxious to have the couple around for dinner, and there are only so many excuses a man can make.

And at home Martin can never quite get the peace he craves. He is kept awake at night by that rowdy slut next door Lina (Carmen Sevilla), and her sadly neglected daughter Cati (Lolita Merino) is forever nosing around the place looking for attention. When to Martin's horror Cati stumbles upon his "wife" Elena he discovers he has more in common with little girls than he suspected, because she is delighted and impressed by such a beautiful big doll! But can the little horror keep a secret? Because if her unscrupulous mother finds out there's no knowing what trouble she could make for him...

This is a moving story of loss and loneliness. Martin has become a rebel with his perverse romance, but an unwilling and unhappy one. If the world cannot approve of what he does, why can't it at least leave him be? And sometimes life just seems plain unfair. At a grand company ceremony the boss plays a tape with a message from the founder, his own dead father. When you think about it, it's a mildly strange and morbid thing to do, yet one man is respected and the other scorned.

Incidentally, Alone almost certainly influenced Joe D'Amato's classic of tastelessness and squalour Beyond the Darkness, with one line being particularly telling. In the similarly-themed Italian film the subject was an embalmed body rather than a doll, but the mortification of having the most precious object of one's desire contemptuously dismissed as "that other one" must have been equally intense in either case.

Montage Martin and Elena, with Lina and Cati.

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Vázquez is, as you would expect, brilliant in the lead. His hangdog features perfectly express his character's sadness, anger, reproachment, grief, and bewilderment. The rest of the cast are rather unappealing, especially Carmen Sevilla whose performance as Lina is bland. A remarkable exception is Lolita Merino as little Cati. She is the very essence of the mysterious and terrifyingly unpredictable child. Just Vázquez and her together could have made this succeed as a two-hander.

Visually the style is mostly steady and restrained. The wintry landscapes and especially the funereal setting of the breakers-yard are used to great effect to build a melancholy atmosphere. But occasionally it lashes out to hit you right between the eyes with a spectacular visual flourish. The score is strong too, with a very florid and memorable main theme.

Beautiful, funny, romantic, touching but never mawkish, A Man Shouldn't Be Alone is a masterpiece.

Ratings

Quality: 9/10   Fun: 9/10

Review copy

Publisher		Unlicensed
Format		DVD Region 0, NTSC 4:3 (2.35:1 letterbox)
Certificate
Image		Sub-VHS, bad vertical hold problem early on