Susana

Luis Buñuel's 1951 Mexican film opens with a young woman escaping a reformatory. Susana takes shelter on a prosperous farm during a storm; the family takes her in out of pity and puts her to work. She quickly binds every man in the house to her, with the owner, his son and the foreman falling for her in turn, and the household order collapses. Buñuel tells this apparently as melodrama, but his real target is the family itself: piety, morality and the claim to order fall apart at the first provocation. The ending comes with everything returning to how it was, which is regarded as the film's most sardonic passage. He made it while working under commercial conditions in Mexico and broke the conventions of the genre from inside. It is short. Who it's for: viewers who like Buñuel and classic Mexican melodrama. Who it's not for: anyone who will find the construction of the female character as a temptress uncomfortable.