The Luis Buñuel Project – That Obscure Object Of Desire

Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: tasteofcinema.com

Luis Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object Of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet Du Désir) (France / Spain, 1977), is an adaptation of the 1898 novel La Femme Et Le Pantin (The Woman And The Puppet) by Pierre Louÿs, which served as an effective vehicle for both Marlene Dietrich (Von Sternberg’s The Devil Is A Woman) and Brigitte Bardot (Julien Duvivier’s The Female). Once again he collaborated with Jean-Claude Carrière on the screenplay, and the basic narrative of the book is left intact. But Buñuel and Carrière nonetheless put their own irreverently surreal cast on material that had already taken some politically incorrect liberties, even in 1898.

Buñuel regular Fernando Rey is Mathieu, a wealthy, well-groomed man-about-town who becomes obsessed with a poor but pretty Spanish working girl named Conchita. He relates the story of the relationship (in flashbacks) to the other passengers of his train coach, who have just watched him dump a bucket of water on the pursuing Conchita’s head before embarking. Mathieu, who regards himself as a devoted and generous find for any woman whom he might take a fancy to, has treated Conchita to enormous amounts of attention and indulgence. Conchita, nonetheless, torments him with varying and escalating degrees of tease and denial, imploring him to not see her as a possession but as another person with her own full life and desires. By the time Mathieu boards this train, he’s seemingly done with her.

Conchita first appears as a chambermaid in Mathieu’s household, inexperienced but earnest. That evening, Mathieu wastes no time in conveying his affections towards his strikingly lovely new employee. She demurs and they part, minutes later, on seemingly flirty good terms, but Mathieu discovers the next day that Conchita has quit. Months later, while languishing in Switzerland, he encounters her again; she’s touring with some musician friends (as a dancer) and they’ve just been stiffed by their agent. He helps them out with some cash (after being oddly pranked by them), and learns where Conchita lives in Paris. He visits often, ingratiating himself with Conchita’s mother and offering them favor upon kind favor. He eventually asks Conchita’s mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage, and offers her a large financial incentive. But Conchita again refuses, feeling that Mathieu is buying off Mom instead of earning her own affections patiently and honestly, and disappears. A few months later, Mathieu and his magistrate brother Edouard (Julien Bertheau) are having lunch at a posh restaurant and discover that Conchita is the recently-hired coat-check girl. Once again reunited, Conchita agrees to live with Mathieu at his country estate.

Fernando Rey and Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: dvdactive.com

Here, at roughly the halfway point of the film, is a good spot to assess the larger context. Mathieu‘s Paris, and greater Europe for that matter, is plagued by terrorists blowing up cars, shops and restaurants, shooting dignitaries down in the streets and bombing planes. The insurgents are a vague mish-mash of lone wolves, anarchists, religious extremists and other various small groups, all with fearsome acronyms like the P.O.P., the G.R.I.F. and the O.U.T., and all allegedly in the service of the R.A.O.I.J., the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus. Mathieu wields enough privilege and wealth to avoid most of this, but it’s an insistent background. Conchita is a fascinating character made even more complex by the famous stroke of Buñuel and Carrière’s of casting two separate actresses in the one role. Carole Bouquet – French, tall, willowy and wry, making her feature debut, seems more elegant, and somewhat regretful at denying Mathieu his way with her. Ángela Molina, an earthy and cheery Spanish actress with a bit more experience, is more extroverted and engaging, but also more directly defiant. Neither performer is used for particular consistent purposes, though – Buñuel and Carrière alternate them almost at random, a few times within the very same scene. Mathieu’s having to contend with two Conchitas adds extra complexity, and extra boundaries to negotiate. But Buñuel the surrealist is far more interested in letting created associations reverberate than in setting up specific symbols or allegorical contexts. The film is full of visual non-sequiturs: mouse traps, pet baby pigs, a fly in a cocktail. A seamstress repairs an embroidery tear on a blood-streaked piece of fabric, and there are recurring guest appearances by a burlap bag – sackcloth, perhaps?

Mathieu’s country estate is quite nice, but terrorists have disabled the nearby power station. The candlelit evening would seem to be conducive to mutual romance, and Mathieu is delighted that he can finally be intimate and alone with Conchita. But Conchita is adamant about protecting her chastity; he can be as intimate as he likes, but she won’t surrender that. (“Just wait a little while longer. You know I’m yours and yours alone. What more do you want?”) Days go by, they spend lovely recreational days together in Paris, but she still insists on remaining chaste. One night after being turned down again, Mathieu discovers that Conchita’s musician friend has been sleeping over with her in the other room after being tossed out of his hotel. (“But don’t worry, we slept back to back – exactly as I do with you!”). Mathieu throws her out, but he’s irretrievably smitten. He has Edouard use his connections to get Conchita and her mother deported back to Seville, but he then pursues them there anyway. He becomes more obsessive, more pos-sessive, and she continues to profess her love while making him jump through more increasingly demeaning hoops. “I belong to no one, and I am my most precious possession.”

Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: pinterest.com

Mathieu is the protagonist here, and in seeing the relationship through his eyes  we’re naturally sympathetic to his frustrations concerning Conchita. But Buñuel, throughout the film, is just as much on Conchita’s side, and is clearly admiring of her self-protective tendencies; there’s no evidence that Mathieu wouldn’t toss her over if given his full indulgences. It’s why she won’t ask him for money; as long as he sees it as a means to his end, he’ll always give it to her anyway. He’ll pay her and Mom’s rent, she can have a room on his country estate, he’ll buy her a small villa in Seville. She meets his frustrations with cruelty, and vice-versa; at one point he strikes her, repeatedly, and, face bloodied, she responds with “Now I know you love me.” Conchita’s reaction may distress us these days (it distressed some back then), but it’s true to Louÿs’ book – after this episode, it’s definitely her pursuing him now – but Buñuel uses this moment to obscure things further; is this another manipulative tactic, or is she truly relenting? Has he done enough for her by now to earn her acquiescence? The privileged Mathieu never changes throughout the entire story, but Conchita has no choice but to strive,  adapt, and oftentimes submit, in order to keep a roof over her head, food in her mouth, and love in her modest life. By the time we end up back on that train, though, near the end, it’s pretty clear what each of them know they need, and how pointlessly, even maliciously, they’re willing to treat each other in order not to just admit that to each other. The terrorists are the least of our problems, some might say – just look what we do to each other. And Luis Buñuel has a good laugh at our expense, again…

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: wondersinthedark.wordpress.com

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret De La Bourgeoisie) (France, 1972) was the Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner in 1973. Academy members had been no doubt watching Luis Buñuel’s career throughout the sixties – the films are always entertaining, in their particular ways – and now they had finally found one of his films that didn’t feature poverty, disfigurements, sexual fetishes, outright blasphemy or homages to the Marquis de Sade. A winner! But simmering here underneath the narrative’s overt drawing-room-comedy aspects are Buñuel’s (and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière‘s) usual darkly surrealist conceits regarding sex, death and dreams.

The film is a series of episodes where a group of friends attempt to sit down together and have a proper meal. There’s Don Raphael (Fernando Rey), an ambassador to a fictional Latin American country, M. and Mme. Thévenot (Paul Frankeur and Delphine Seyrig), Mme. Thévenot’s younger sister Florence (Bulle Ogier), and the Sénéchals, Henri and Alice (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran). But they arrive for a friend’s dinner on the wrong night. Or they discover the restaurateur has passed away and is lying in state in the adjoining dining room. Or a seemingly busy café is out of tea. And coffee. And milk. Or a military squad on war exercises arrives and must eat first. The interruptions become sillier, and/or darker, and/or more abstract as the narrative moves along. But it’s what’s revealed about the characters along the way that gives the film its subversive frisson. Between social engagements, the three men are active in the international cocaine trade. Don Raphael is stalked by a pretty female ‘terrorist’ selling stuffed animals (whom of course quickly becomes desaparecido thanks to two of his agents), and he is often asked about the allegedly miserable and corrupt conditions of his small country, which he amiably denies. The Thévenot’s are gourmand connoisseurs; she poring over menu choices or guessing dishes from the kitchen smells, while he goes on and on about his own delicious caviar supplies or his making the perfect martini while demonstrating that the working class is too unrefined to be allowed to drink them. “There’s nothing more relaxing than a dry martini,” he states. “I read it in a woman’s magazine.” The sister, Florence, is perky and charming, but prone to overindulgence in the aforementioned martinis. The Sénéchals are textbook social companions – there’s no indication of what they do for a living or where their contentedness springs from, but dinners are usually at their place, provided by a kitchen full of domestics, except on the rare occasion where Henri and Alice sneak down their own back trellis to have sex with each other in the backyard behind the bushes, while their guests wait to be served…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: archive-cinema.tumbler.com

Each potential meal with the six becomes its own little parlor drama, but some of them feature other guests as well. Monsignor Dufour (Julien Bertheau) is the presiding local bishop, but nothing makes him happier than gardening for the Sénéchals on the side. A young soldier in the out-of-everything café, apropos of nothing, narrates a grisly ghost story of familial betrayal and retribution. A sergeant in the military squad relates a dream he had about meeting dead friends on a quiet city street. Then, gradually, our main characters’ exploits start slipping into dreams as well. The military-squad Colonel (Claude Piéplu) invites all to dinner at his place, but his whisky is cola, the chickens are rubber, and his dining room turns out to be a stage in a theater, with a booing, whistling audience deriding them all for not knowing their ‘lines.’ Then Henri Sénéchal wakes up… to go to the Colonel’s for dinner, where he witnesses Don Raphael arguing with the Colonel over insults to his country, and then shooting him in fury. And then M. Thévenot wakes up. It doesn’t all dissolve into dreams, though – Monsignor Dufour is called to the side of a dying man for last rites, only to discover the man is the killer of Dufour’s own parents. Should he absolve him or avenge them? If only this could be a dream…

Speaking of crime, the intrepid Inspector Delecluze (François Maistre) breaks the case of the cocaine-smuggling diplomat, and promptly arrests Don Raphael and his five accomplices just as they’re sitting down to dinner. (*gasp!*) Delecluze dreams of a bloody, ghostly sergeant letting prisoners free at night, and, now awake, he receives a call from an interior minister ordering him to free his arrestees. Freed, they sit down to dinner again. But now there are gangsters with machine guns…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: 1001plus.blogspot.com

A genuine surrealist, Luis Buñuel rarely trafficks in outright allegory or symbolism. He, rather, sets up a series of recurring associations, and hopes that you’ll draw a lot of the same impressions and conclusions that he has. But, if that doesn’t happen, he’ll work hard to have, at least, entertained you anyway. Overlapping dreams, irony and surprise, stagey and stylized sex and violence, and even a soundtrack that interrupts its own characters are familiar devices these days, but Buñuel and Carrière were true masters at inventing and employing them. The film overall seems remarkably tame these days, almost half-hearted compared to the comedies and satires that ensued over the following 45 years, inspired by work like this. But there are still very few films that are even remotely like these late Buñuel films. Indulge.

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Milky Way and Tristana

Luis Buñuel’s films are of such gracious curmudgeonly humor, intelligence and narrative creativity that it’s easy to mistake his lesser efforts for ‘disappointments.’ It’s a trap I’m afraid I caught myself falling into upon viewing his two late-sixties works, The Milky Way and Tristana. Wonderful films like Nazarin, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Belle De Jour are quite singular creations; thoughtfully rigorous narratives expressed clearly and efficiently, with little patience for manipulative sentiment or lesson-learned false earnestness. I found The Milky Way and Tristana to be a little re-hashed, a little formulaic in their individual ways – more interesting and admirable than genuinely provocative or entertaining. But, honestly, we’re still working in a pretty rare league of filmed storytelling here; not only did Buñuel (born in 1900) make these films while entering his seventies, but the three films that followed these are flat-out masterpieces.

The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée) (France, 1969) is similar to 1965’s Simon Of The Desert – an entertaining survey and critique of Christian beliefs and dogma. Buñuel collaborates here with Jean-Claude Carrière to create an archetypical road movie. The film follows two “kings of the road,” an older, grizzled Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and his young and skeptical traveling pal Jean (Laurent Terzieff), whom are making the traditional humble pilgrimage from central France to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, where the holy remains of St. James are allegedly preserved. But they’re not going for their spiritual health or historical edification – they’re looking to make some money, begging for alms and taking advantage of the tourist trade there. The film clearly begins in the motorized present day, but as our pilgrims make their picaresque progress, they encounter a variety of characters and situations seemingly transplanted from different periods of history.

Bernard Verley in “The Milky Way.”  credit: cinema-francais.fr

Episodically, Buñuel and Carrière explore six major tenets of Christianity, and the ‘heresies’ thereof that arose in opposition: the Eucharist – communion and transubstantiation (the wine and host/wafer becoming the blood and body of Christ); the distinction between Good and Evil, extrapolated as spiritual/physical, the soul and the body, subjective and objective; the dual nature of Christ as both human man and divine being; the concept of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit); the conflict between Grace and Freedom, and the assertion or sublimation of Free Will; and the mystery of the nature of The Virgin Mary.  But, of course, there’s nothing doctrinaire about Buñuel’s presentations – an explanation of transubstantiation, and a dismissal of those who doubt, is delivered by a mischievous priest who ends up being apprehended by the white-coated attendants from the hospital he escaped – again. The heretic bishop Priscillian, addressing a small crowd of medieval acolytes, explains that our bodies are the creation of the Devil – only our souls are divine – which, based on those priorities, leads to a medieval acolyte orgy. The snooty maître d’ at an elegant provincial restaurant is happy to extol the teachings of Jesus, the man and the God, to his fellow workers, while giving the boot to Pierre and Jean’s humble request for scraps. At one point we even leave our two travelers and follow the other adventures of two young Protestant students (Denis Manuel and Daniel Pilon), heckling a bishop over the Trinity, exchanging identities with two hunters in the woods, and receiving seemingly mystical visitations in the woods and within their hotel rooms. Early in the film, a mysterious caped figure instructs Pierre and Jean to have their way with a whore, who will bear them children. As the film concludes, our travelers are indeed waylaid by the Whore of Babylon (Delphine Seyrig), who expresses her wish to have their children, and their destination is quickly forgotten. And peppered amongst these instructional chapters are appearances and observations from the Marquis de Sade, a persuasive lightning-bolt, a Spanish inquisitor, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus himself, hangin’ with his buds and casually dropping miracles here and there, with varying degrees of success..

Paul Frankeur, Laurent Terzieff and Pierre Clementi in ‘The Milky Way.” credit: fr.film-cine.com

Buñuel would employ this omnibus / series of satirical sketches format in his later films as well; after the explosion of sketch-comedy shows like Monty Python and SCTV and The Young Ones, etc., The Milky Way doesn’t feel like a precursor and model for much of that, even though it is, clearly. At one point, a Jesuit and a Jansenist actually take swords up to duel over the nature of Grace and Predetermination  – they shout religious academic arguments at each other between parries and thrusts – and one could easily picture Eric Idle and Graham Chapman in their places.

Laurent Terzieff, Delphine Seyrig and Paul Frankeur in “The Milky Way.” credit: kebekmac.blogspot.com

I vastly prefer when Buñuel illustrates his rich views of fickle human nature and institutionalized belief systems within a larger narrative (Nazarin, Viridiana, Diary Of A Chambermaid) rather than creating a linear plot that simply becomes the delivery device for the overt points he wants to make. Simon Of The Desert wasn’t supposed to be as short as it ended up being, but its brevity works to the film’s advantage; just as we start to feel a little lectured-to, things wrap up. With The Milky Way, Buñuel got to spend more time in the candy store, and some of the segments overstay their welcome – a lengthy scene at a rural girls’ school picnic is oddly humorless, and weirdly (but thankfully)  interrupted by Jean’s own reverie of a group of armed anarchists assassinating the Pope. Later, a friendly Spanish priest goes on and on and on about the Virgin Mary, relating a fairly interesting miracle story at first, and then intrusively prattling on from the opposite side of closed doors after everyone else has called it a night. Buñuel delights in exposing the ulterior motives of these self-interested, self-promoting clerics, but it all feels a bit overindulged.

So I was looking forward to seeing Buñuel’s Tristana (France, 1970), another adaptation of a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, whom had given us Nazarin and Viridiana. It tells the story of Don Lope (Fernando Rey), a wealthy Spanish nobleman who becomes the guardian of Tristana (Catherine Deneuve), a young girl whose widowed mother dies unexpectedly. Generally respected by the clubby male Toledo community, he’s a profligate roué – a trust-fund baby – who wastes little time in having his way with the passive and deferential orphan girl under the guise of fatherly propriety, and later as husband’s prerogative. “Your mother was very good, but not so very intelligent… You never enjoyed your father’s wealth – he lost it all when you were very young.” But as Tristana grows and enriches herself under the higher-class milieu that the Don has provided her, she develops an independent streak and ultimately chooses to run off with the artist Don Horatio (Franco Nero). But Don Lope has tutored her well in self-indulgent non-commitment, whether she’s aware of it or not, and her co-dependence is profound – she and the artist never marry, and when a nasty tumor from a mysterious disease (am I out of line to suspect syphilis here?) leads to the amputation of her leg, she returns to the house of Don Lope to languish and, eventually, take revenge on him.

Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve in “Tristana.” credit: 50anosdefilmes.com.br

Catherine Deneuve frequently cites Tristana as one of her most satisfying performances, and it’s easy to see why. Tristana’s transformation – from doe-eyed orphan schoolgirl to She Who Must Be Served, dressed in black, strutting out of her perfunctory church-marriage to Don Lope with cane and prosthetic leg, and attended to in her wheelchair by the housekeeper’s deaf-mute son – is the best part of the film. The rest is a surprisingly conventional melodrama, although there are some hints of Buñuel’s usual stew of psychology and fetish. The very first scene introduces us to Saturna (Lola Gaos, excellent here), Don Lope’s housekeeper, taking Tristana out for a walk to get her out of the house (and enliven her near-cloistered life under Don Lope), but stopping off to check on her deaf-mute son, Saturno (Jesús Fernández), who continually acts out anger at his school. (Saturna and Saturno – hard not to think of Goya here…). Even at this early stage, only minutes into the film, we have a glimpse of Tristana’s bond with Saturno as a fellow outsider, and as a potential partner in crime – after the headmaster scolds him for getting into a fight during a football match, she gives him an apple. Uncharacteristically, Buñuel opts for outright symbolism throughout, rather than his more ambiguous but resonant surrealist perspective. Tristana has a recurring dream about Don Lope’s decapitated head acting as the clapper of a giant church bell, but beyond that touch of absurdity it’s all, disappointingly, Freud and mythology.

Catherine Deneuve in “Tristana.” credit: cinedivergente.com

Later on, The Milky Way became the first film of what Buñuel and Carrière eventually fashioned into a trilogy (The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie and The Phantom Of Liberty followed, and both relied on that same format of a series of disparate episodes across a linear narrative). Discreet Charm involves a group of wealthy people trying to have dinner together. Phantom seems like a random series of dream sketches, but is unified by Buñuel and Carrière’s observation of how short-sighted the characters are, and how they all seem to exist in a self-serving, vacuum-sealed eternal present, despite the historical and philosophical signifiers surrounding them throughout. It’s the most surreal of his later films – rough going for the uninitiated, but quite wonderful.

As for Tristana, I’ve seen suggestions elsewhere that it’s actually a good place to start if you’ve never seen a Buñuel film, and I’d agree with that. Just about any of his other 60s films are much better, but Buñuel always serves Pérez Galdós well, and vice-versa. And it’s one of my favorite Deneuve performances. While not as conceptually rigorous as the others, Tristana is a good example of what I’d call Buñuel’s gracious misanthropy – he’s unstinting in showing us the blithering follies we consign ourselves to socially, morally and philosophically, but he almost always evinces empathy as well. “There but for the grace of God…?”

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Viridiana

While Nazarin and The Young One were by no means financial successes, Luis Buñuel and his producers were very pleased with them, and, confident of consistent financial backing, he forged on to develop a number of subsequent film projects to build on the American connections he’d made with the latter film – potential adaptions of more Benito Pérez Galdos novels, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Matthew Lewis’s 19^th-century gothic novel The Monk, and works by Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortazar. But an unexpected thing came up; as part of Francisco Franco’s ‘modernization’ efforts in the late fifties and early sixties, Buñuel was invited to return to the Spain he had fled in the thirties to make new films. Despite a hue and cry from many of his virulently anti-fascist Spanish refugee friends, he indeed returned to his homeland. But the film he made was no capitulation – in fact, it reinvigorated many of the same controversies that his 1930s surrealist work had evoked. A cartoon of the day depicted a jovial Buñuel delivering the reels of his new film to a welcoming Generalissimo; the last panel shows the film exploding in Franco’s face.

Viridiana (Spain, 1962), like Nazarin, is yet another character study of a person of strong religious and moral convictions who has those foundations subverted by the earthbound realities of cold commerce and human nature. It’s often cited as an adaptation of Benito Pérez Galdos’ Halma, but, while it shares an incident or two from that novel, the story is completely fictionalized by Buñuel, drawing on his interest in Saint Verdiana, an Italian saint known for her early self-sacrificing charity and, later, her stark seclusion as an anchorite in a small cell in Castelfiorentino for 34 years. He also included an obsession or two of his own (a dream/fantasy of sleeping with the drugged Queen of Spain), a reference or two to DeSade, his usual injections of good-humored fetishism, and his affinity for the salt-of-the-earth types that populated a number of his Mexican films.

Silvia Pinal in ‘Viridiana.’ credit: bfi.org.uk

Viridiana (a radiant Silvia Pinal) is a young nun about to take her sisterhood vows when the Mother Superior tells her that her distant Uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), her last living relative, is unable to attend the ceremony, and requests that she visit him for a few days beforehand.  Viridiana barely knows the man, but Mother Superior reveals that he’s subsidized her education, and is an earnest supporter of their work. Reluctantly, Viridiana acquiesces to the Mother Superior’s insistence. Arriving at Don Jaime’s estate, she finds him to be a pensive and saddened man who has never moved on from the death of his wife (Viridiana’s mother’s sister), and has allowed the spacious farmlands to lie fallow for over twenty years; nonetheless, he’s happy about her arrival and visit, and she quickly ingratiates herself with the other workers in the house and on the estate. But Viridiana’s been cloistered for years, and many aspects of the casual earthiness of the estate challenge her sense of chaste propriety. She learns that Don Jaime has an illegitimate son, about her age, and that his obsession with his wife’s death is far more perverse than she could imagine. Assisted by his devoted housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano), Don Jaime drugs Viridiana in an attempt to violate her and prevent her from returning to the monastery; her resemblance to his late wife has addled his heart (and libido). He relents at the last minute, but tells her the next day that it is, indeed, what he did. Furious and humiliated, Viridiana packs and departs, but the police stop her from boarding the train, and reveal to her that a tragedy has just occurred. She returns to the estate to find that Don Jaime has taken his own life.

Fernando Rey and Silvia Pinal in ‘Viridiana.’ credit: filmlinc.com

The estate and grounds are left to his only heirs – Viridiana and the illegitimate son, Jorge (the reliable Francisco Rabal, last seen in Nazarin). Jorge is an urban playboy who has been working in architecture, and has brought along his current girlfriend, Lucia. But Lucia is quickly bored with Jorge’s determined efforts to modernize the house and restore the farm, and Jorge swiftly takes up with the starry-eyed Ramona. Viridiana, meanwhile, has chosen not to return to the convent, and turns her wing of the estate into a refuge for the local indigents. She doesn’t directly blame herself, but whatever inner demons compelled Don Jaime to his depravity and suicide certainly weren’t deterred by her inner purity and devotion – she feels unworthy to return to the sisterhood, and devotes herself to helping the gnarliest of the village’s social detritus. Things start out well – the group is grateful to her, even if they think she’s a little crazy – but things disintegrate quickly when Viridiana and Jorge travel to town to confer with their lawyers. The band of beggars take over the grand house’s dining room, enjoy a spectacularly reckless dinner, and, to the strains of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ enact their own squalid tableau of DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper.’ Jorge and Viridiana return to the impressive wreckage only to be accosted by their guests, with Viridiana once again having her chastity forcibly threatened.

‘Viridiana.’ credit: filmoteca.cat

Needless to say, Franco was unimpressed with Buñuel’s darkly comic and deeply disturbing (even today, fifty years later, I promise) tale of pious innocence corrupted by harsh secular reality, and the film was condemned by both the Spanish government and the Vatican. Small wonder it won that year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Buñuel’s flat-out masterpiece is a miraculously balanced film – he had a pretty serious budget to work with, and his work with prolific Spanish cinematographer José F. Aguayo is gorgeous throughout. Buñuel’s enlightened humanism ennobles practically every shot of the film, despite how the scenario almost relentlessly stacks the deck against his beautiful protagonist. It’s pretty clear that Mother Superior orders Viridiana to Don Jaime’s company as a concession to his material generosity to the convent, and, after Don Jaime’s death, she’s visibly relieved that Viridiana has chosen not to return there, quickly washing her hands of the whole incident. Don Jaime is a veritable catalogue of fetishes, doting lasciviously on Ramona’s young jump-roping daughter,  discreetly but ardently trying on elements of his late wife’s wedding garments, and passive-aggressively enlisting Ramona in his impulsive plan to shame Viridiana into staying. When Viridiana collects her impromptu family of beggars, lepers, loose women and criminals, she clearly hasn’t the slightest notion of what she’s getting herself into. Even the final scene, with Jorge inviting the shell-shocked Viridiana to share a game of cards with he and Ramona, carries a sly carnal undercurrent. As in Nazarin, Buñuel can’t help but like even his most grotesque creations; for all of his dark eccentricities, Don Jaime is ultimately a very charming and sympathetic man, and Viridiana’s beggarly charges are ribaldly entertaining practically to the last. We can tsk and shake our heads (occasionally laughing despite ourselves) at the extremities of this squalid lot, but who’s to say that any one of them would have been unwelcome at Jesus’ own last supper? Viridiana’s good intentions are cruelly unrewarded, but we still have deep respect for them, and her, throughout the film, as does Buñuel.