I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #163 - Tristana (1970, dir. Luis Buñuel)

Luis Buñuel’s relationship with his home country of Spain was a complicated one – it informed his work and was the root of his uniquely skewed outlook on the world, but he spent most of his life out of the country and made only three films there during his career. Born in the mountain town of Calanda in 1900, he moved with his family to the rural region of Aragon and its capital city Zaragoza when he was young. Attending college in Madrid, he became close friends with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, moving to France after graduation and joining the Surrealist group with Dalí, ultimately creating one of his most famous works with him, the short film Un Chien Andalou. He made another film (the scandalous L’Age d’Or) with Dalí before their friendship dissolved, then returned to Spain during the turbulent years leading up to the Spanish Civil War. Back in Spain, Buñuel made another short film, Las Hurdes, a semi-documentary about a poverty-stricken mountainous region of Spain near the Portuguese border. The film provoked an uproar with Spanish officials for its brutal depiction of extreme poverty and was banned in Spain from 1933 to 1936, and then again by Francisco Franco’s regime when he came to power after the Civil War. Buñuel left the country when Civil War broke out, departing for the U.S. and then Mexico, where he settled for the rest of his life.

After re-establishing himself as a filmmaker of note in Mexico, Buñuel was invited by Spain to make a film funded by the government, presumably looking to call Spain’s filmmaking son back to his homeland. But the film he made, Viridiana (based on a novel by the author Benito Pérez Galdós), contained scenes considered blasphemous and subversive – despite the script being approved by censors. Franco attempted to have the film destroyed and recalled from its entry at the Cannes film festival, but Buñuel had already left the country with his film. It was immediately banned in Spain, but won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and pushed Buñuel to the upper ranks of international directors, allowing him to make some of his seminal works throughout the 60s.

With these two films created in Spain behind him, it was with some trepidation that the Spanish government again allowed Buñuel to make a third film, Tristana. Could another film made with Franco still in power, be trusted in the hands of Buñuel, the man who said of his surrealist days “Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny - in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed.”? Apparently so!

Tristana, unlike Buñuel’s previous Spanish films, did not provoke outrage or scandal and was not banned in Spain (or elsewhere, to my knowledge) – but it could have been. Buñuel turned again to a Galdós novel as source material and found a work that’s very similar in tone to Viridiana – a young woman is taken in by an older gentleman after her parents’ passing and he takes more than a paternal interest in her. The gentleman, Don Lope, is again played by Fernando Rey (in his second of four collaborations with Buñuel), and the young woman Tristana is played by Catherine Deneuve, who Buñuel had worked with to great effect in Belle de Jour. Their relationship in the film is complex and always shifting – Tristana starts the film naïve and meek, a religious woman still mourning the loss of her family, while Don Lope is an atheistic, anti-capitalistic, mostly leftist gentleman who nevertheless retains some archaic notions of honor (very similar to Buñuel himself, in fact). Though Tristana is repulsed by his advances she still remains under his care and as the film continues she begins to assert her independence and a shift begins. Tristana slowly adopts the hardened exterior of her guardian while his strong postures fade away and he becomes the helpless ward. Ironically, it’s Don Lope’s regular talk of the assertion of freedom and individual will that powers Tristana’s bids for autonomy that leave him an emotional wreck.

While the film doesn’t have the outré shock value of Buñuel’s earlier work, it’s a deeply weird and complex film underneath, simultaneously condemning and offering sympathy for Don Lope in his doomed desires for young Tristana (he is referred to throughout the film by various characters as old and hence unattractive), and similarly finding outrage in how Tristana is treated when she’s young, only have her behave monstrously later in life. It wouldn’t be too difficult for Spanish censors who had been upset by Viridiana’s suggestive relationship with her cousin in the earlier film to find in this film a full-bore attack on traditional and family values, frequently showing Don Lope’s moralism as out of touch and his relationship with Tristana considerably more unchaste than the one depicted in Viridiana. And Tristana herself even voices Don Lope’s ideals of remaining unmarried, a free agent in the world of romance able to choose who she wishes to be with and when.

In Buñuel’s universe, boundaries placed on desire are always under attack, and Tristana’s undermining of family values and portrait of marriage as a corrupt institution should, in theory, have been upsetting to Spanish censors. But for some reason, perhaps because rising stars Catherine Deneuve and Franco Nero were cast to help the film toward international success and nobody involved on the Spanish side of the production wanted to seem to be as out of touch as Don Lope, the film passed without friction. It’s as mysterious, challenging, sardonic, and strangely beautiful as any film in Buñuel’s catalog.

-         Patrick Brown

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #68 - The Hunger (1983, dir. Tony Scott) Starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon, David Bowie. 96 mins. Rated R

These days, 21^st century America’s version of the fountain of youth spurts forth a steady stream of botox injections, facelifts, chemical peels and other torturous-sounding procedures promising a grasp at a newer, younger you. Although this trend has been many decades in the making, it really rose to public consciousness in the self-absorbed, consumerist 1980s. However, you wouldn’t necessarily include vampires in the target audience for discovering a youth serum - unless, of course, you’ve seen The Hunger.

Based on a book by Whitley Strieber (author of Communion), The Hunger tells the story of a centuries-old female vampire named Miriam Blaylock (played by the exquisite Catherine Deneuve), as she deals with the sudden accelerated demise of her taken lover John (David Bowie), who up until recently had been living alongside her, un-aged, through several hundred years old. The bloodlust that has satiated John’s needs and kept him pristine for centuries no longer has an affect on him, and his weakened state becomes compromising to his necessarily violent lifestyle -- as well as inconvenient for Miriam, who has already experienced this phenomenon with other lovers throughout the ages.

As she searches for ways to turn back the clock for her rapidly deteriorating lover, Miriam comes across a doctor named Sarah (Susan Sarandon) specializing in Hodgkins-Progeria, a medical condition with very similar qualities to the ones John is experiencing. As time quickly runs out, John is put out to pasture with her other, former lovers (in the attic coffin storage, naturally) and Miriam must make the decision to take on a new partner, whom she finds in Sarah during an erotically charged vampire seduction. But nothing is what it seems, especially in New York in the 1980’s, and Sarah has her own plans in store for the future.

 From the opening scenes featuring the heavily shadowed, skeletal face of gaunt goth-rocker Peter Murphy as he sings “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” while spasmodically dancing behind a steel grate, to the stylized music-video-esque editing, the film has visual elements that are stunning and, at the same time somewhat pretentious. With a decidedly 1980’s aura and a visibly (and self-described by director Tony Scott) “operatic” feel, the whole film might very well suffer from a case of overly tortured hip-ness if not for the superb acting and artistic license taken with the characters and their settings.

Yes, there are eye-rolling eighties elements that might amuse some more sophisticated and modern movie-goers, like the constantly billowing curtains, strobe lights, and thick, smoky atmospheres (there is a cigarette in almost every shot, after all), but the scenes are still filmed with a photographer’s eye -- Scott admitting that he was heavily influenced by the works of Helmut Newton and fellow directors like Nicolas Roeg and Stanley Kubrick. Asymmetrically balanced shots, moody lighting and sharp angles lend a harder edge to the visuals while subduing the more gory aspects, which are still actively present in the flowing rivulets of bright red blood streaks throughout. Detailed but sleek wardrobes by Italian costume designer Milena Canonero bring an air of couture-laden fashion that aptly represents New York at that period, and the fitting soundtrack features works by classical composers like Bach, Delibes, Schubert and other haunting classical pieces.

The DVD special features include an informative commentary track from director Tony Scott and lead actress Susan Sarandon, who look back with both fond and strained memories of the making of the film as well as the critical reaction to it following its release.

--Shove M., Used Buyer, DVD Witch and Grab Bag Wrangler

I'd Love To Turn You On - At The Movies #9 - Belle de Jour (1967, dir. Luis Buñuel)

By this point in his career, Luis Buñuel had earned the license to range far and wide in his films and basically do whatever he wanted. So it's interesting that this film - adapted by Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrire from a novel I have not read - is so relatively straightforward (relative to his other films, that is). It came right on the heels of the eccentric short Simon of the Desert and precedes the oddball, picaresque tour of heresies in The Milky Way and so could very easily have been one of his films where the plot is merely an excuse to string a group of his obsessive fantasies over. But it actually - despite sometimes unheralded dreams and fantasies - falls into a relatively simple story pattern.
Séverine (played with brilliant understatement by a beautiful and young Catherine Deneuve) is a woman married to a handsome young doctor. She's frigid and unable to give him any real emotional or physical warmth, despite constant reassurances that she will do so soon. It's slowly revealed in flashbacks (that are not announced as such) that she may have been sexually abused as a child and that this is likely the source of her frigidity and also her fantasies of sexual debasement. It's also what piques her curiosity when she learns that an acquaintance - an upper class woman like Séverine - is prostituting herself during the day for a high-class madame. Séverine goes to meet another madame, Madame Anais, and in a heartbeat is christened Belle de Jour for her new day job, where she surprisingly finds herself able to express herself emotionally and sexually in a way she can't with her husband. This of course leads directly to emotional entanglements and complications she wasn’t expecting – unable to lead a double life when her fantasy life begins to cross over into her real life, she finds it’s not as easy to simply withdraw from the lifestyle as she thought.
Buñuel plays out this scenario more or less deadpan – things that seem like his old surrealist jokes turn out to have direct significance on the events that unfold, and what at first appears to be his absurdist sense of humor at play proves to be just another layer of the story he and Carriere have constructed. Also working toward the total effect of the film is Sacha Vierny’s evenly lit and unadorned cinematography. Unlike many film masters, Buñuel is not known for his camerawork – when he can make it simple, he does – and the Vierny adapts well to this cool style. The last piece of the puzzle – well, the last one I’m going to mention anyway, to tell you everything about the film would ruin the delight of simply watching a master filmmaker at work – is a nod to the performances – not just Deneuve’s Séverine/Belle, but Jean Sorel as her eternally patient husband, Pierre Clémenti as the dangerous criminal Marcel, and Michel Piccoli and Pierre’s friend Henri Husson, whom Séverine has a long-standing dislike for. All of them hit exactly the right pitch in their performances that keeps the film believable, and keeps in a realistic realm what could easily have turned into a sordid melodrama. This is one of Buñuel’s finest accomplishments – the perfect marriage of his explorations of the surrealist concept of l’amour fou and a drama that can engage anyone.