The Young One

Luis Buñuel's 1960 film is one of the two he made in English. It is set on a small island off the American south. Traver, a Black musician accused of raping a white woman, escapes a lynch mob and takes refuge there. The only people on the island are Miller, the game warden, and Evvie, a young girl whose guardian has recently died. Miller has designs on the girl; Traver's arrival disrupts that arrangement and a tension over race, power and ownership builds between the two men. Buñuel draws nobody as wholly good or bad, and Miller's racism can sit in the same scene as Traver's attempt to protect the girl. The film won a prize at Cannes but was received coldly in the United States. Who it's for: viewers who like Buñuel and films that refuse to take an easy moral side. Who it's not for: anyone who does not want to approach scenes about an adult's designs on a girl.