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 #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.

Two films by Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel was a Spanish-born director who made less than five films in his native country, creating the bulk of his work in France and Mexico, which is where he filmed the latest two offerings from the Criterion Collection, The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert. As a member of the Parisian surrealist group in the 1920’s, Buñuel liked to deal in imagery at once confusing and sometimes shocking – at least two of his films were banned in several countries for their scandalous content.

One of the key goals of the surrealists was not just to shock (though it was a favorite tactic) but to liberate thinking from what they perceived as the shackles that bound people to conventional thought. Buñuel was fond of attacking those institutions – social, governmental, and especially religious – that he felt were particularly responsible for providing and reinforcing those barriers to a freer mode of thinking and expression, of living. So it’s no surprise that many of his films circle around themes of frustration, wherein the protagonists find themselves unable for whatever reasons to satisfy even the simplest desires.

Take for example his 1963 masterpiece The Exterminating Angel. In it, a group of upper class citizens return from the opera to their host’s home for dinner. After dinner, they retire to the drawing room for some entertainment before going home. But no one leaves. Nothing physical prevents them from exiting the drawing room; they find that they simply can’t leave. At first it’s an annoying state of affairs, but as it continues for hours, days, weeks (perhaps months? It’s never made clear exactly how long it goes on) and things become more desperate all their well-bred social graces slowly fall away. They argue and fight, they covet neighbors’ wives, they panic, they commit suicide and attack one another – anything they can think of to survive in the room in which they’re trapped. Buñuel of course never clarifies or explains matters – this is simply a situation that exists and how these people respond in the resulting pressure cooker is what’s interesting, milked for black comedy as much as possible and laced throughout with satiric barbs. It’s possibly the finest realization of satirical wit married to more obscure surrealist free expression out of all of his 36 films.


A close second might be his short film Simon of the Desert that, in only 45 minutes, takes an equally humorous and scathing approach in its satire on religious piety, echoing The Exterminating Angel’s attack on bourgeois morals and manner. When Buñuel’s producer ran out of money halfway through production, the film was done. But the structure of his films, in which a central idea runs through like an endless railroad track on which any number of scenes can appear – getting off at an earlier station than originally intended still leaves us with the satisfaction of the journey we wanted. Here, a saint (Simon, played to pious perfection by Claudio Brook) sits atop a pillar in the desert to bring himself closer to God but true to Buñuel’s satiric form, this sort of strict adherence to dogma has no place in the real world. He performs miracles rated by onlookers as so-so, restores a thief’s severed hands only to have the thief’s first act with his new hands turn out to be the slapping of a boisterous child. While these scenes smack of the sort of disrespect bordering on blasphemy that gave his earlier works Viridiana and L'Age D'or such notoriety, it’s Buñuel’s clinical and intellectual (and secular) interest in the subject that also allows him to dryly and humorously explore the theological end of things. Simon is not merely there as an object to poke fun at for his inability to transform earthly matters, he’s also repeatedly tempted by Satan (in the form of actress Silvia Pinal), who appears and reappears in various guises, bringing us back to Buñuel’s interest in desire and frustration (in this case, self-inflicted). The point of all this is that Simon has bound himself to something that – like the class-bound diners of Angel – prevents him from experiencing his own life, from feeling the full range of his being by cutting himself off with his ascetic existence. When the devil finally takes him in the abrupt finale to a rock and roll club Simon doesn’t seem to be in hell, he merely seems disappointed in how mundane the real world can be, removed from the saintly struggles that gave him a sense of purpose.

Both of these films are high water marks for Buñuel and surrealist cinema in general. Both are being released by the Criterion Collection on Tuesday February 10th and are loaded with extras, including interviews on both DVDs with actress Silvia Pinal, interviews with Luis Buñuel from the 1970’s, critical essays, and more.