Viridiana - Criterion Collection
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Movie Reviews of Viridiana - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: THEY WHO INHERIT THE EARTH
Summary: 4 Stars
When Franco came to power in Spain, Luis Bunuel chose self exile. (After all, they DID shoot Lorca.) In 1959 the Franco government was convinced it would help lighten their fascist image by inviting Bunuel back to Spain & giving him some money to make a movie. They must have breathed a sigh of relif when Bunuel said he would base his movie on the life of an obscure Spanish Saint, Viridiana. But when it was finished the government took one look & was so horrified by what it saw that it threw Bunuel out of Spain permanently & tried to get the rest of the world to ban his movie. The rest of the world, instead, started giving it prizes. Two cousins inherit their uncle's farm. The niece, a pious, convent bred girl about to take vows toward becoming a nun, decides she can do God's work in the world. She collects the local homeless & sets them to work in her fields with hoe & pitchfork. The nephew, a wordly man who likes his creature comforts, hires people adept in the latest in agricultural sciences, moves in modern equipment & the housekeeper into his bed. The film then becomes a study in contrasts: Old vs new, sacred vs profane & superstition vs reason. The climax (literally) comes when the cousins are in town attending to personal business. While they are away the rag-tag band of the blind, the lame & the halt decide to have their own little Festival of Fools up at the big house. And this is when all hell breaks loose. Some people were so appalled by what they saw that they thought all hell really DID break loose. (When you see the movie you'll know what caused the ruckus & why.) Fernando Rey is the goatish uncle with decidedly de Sadean intentions toward his neice. Silvia Pinal as Viridiana seems, as usual, to be in someone else's movie but given her character here perhaps it works. (She's like Judith Anderson's Mrs. Danvers but without the passion.) Francisco Rabal as the nephew who is also an observer (possibly standing in for Bunuel) catches the requisite tone of irony & he gets the last line in the movie which suggests a sort of MARIAGE A LA MODE. The film doesn't have the deftness & flow of the French films which were to follow beginning with Bunuel's very next movie THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID. Instead it is primitive & crude like the Mexican films before it. Still it has all the exuberance of a little boy splashing about in a mud puddle. He knows his betters will think he is being naughty & that eventually he will have to pay a price but for the moment he is having so much fun that he just doesn't care.Movie Review: Hypocrisy exposed
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one of the best pictures I have seen in my short life of 75 years. The plot is economical and excellent. The direction of Bunuel is outstanding (hardly news that). The plot exposes the hypocrisy of the devout, the fallibilty of human nature, the hopelessness of poverty and the uselessness of instictive philantropy. It would be difficult to make a better picture on the subject. I have seen it many times and I would see it again and again. Bunuel had to smuggle it out of Spain while Franco was ruling it but Franco loved it too... He would watch it in private...Movie Review: Bunuel dares you to laugh.
Summary: 5 Stars
'Viridiana' begins like a mad Spanish variant on Roger Corman's Poe adaptations. Don Jaime is the Vincent Price-like mad widower (his wife died of heart-attack on their wedding night), haunting his crumbling manor, neglecting his decaying lands, mournfully playing an old piano or listening to Bach and Handel records. At night, by a coffin in which is draped his bride's wedding dress, he wears her shoes and corset. In his past is a shameful story of youthful transgression, and an abandoned, illegitimate son. He invites his niece, Viridana, a dead ringer for his wife, to stay with him for the few days before she takes holy orders. In a fantastic ritual, he asks her to wear the wedding dress and proposes marriage; when she refuses, he drugs her, with the aid of his devoted servant - to whose daughter he gives the skipping rope that takes on an importance from the merely symbolic into the fetishistic and violent - and takes the niece to the bedroom for a necrophiliac rape. Prior to this, he had caught her in one of her sleepwalking trances, throwing her knitting into the fire, and pouring ashes on her uncle's bed. Pure Poe.Poe was one of the acknowledged precursors of the Surrealists, and in 'Viridiana', Bunuel makes use of two Gothic tropes - the Gothic house/castle/manor is often a figure for the disintegrating mind, but also a metaphor for the nation: Don Jaime's madness, his gentility masking a dangerous egotism, his passion perversely and inwardly directed so that it feeds on itself, his neglect of the land, are all tenets of Franco's Spain, a pinched, gnarled, sterile world in this film.
The Gothic was also the genre in which society could dramatise those anxieties - death, sexual deviance, social disruption - not talked aobut in the middle class public sphere. Gothic novels often featured representative, hyper-virtuous heroines who had to negotiate evils such a society would cast out. Such a reading applies to 'Viridiana' also, with the title character, who has spent most of her life closed off from the world, hidden from its temptations, confronted with unpalatable distortions of desire, family, the body, community, class etc.
In 'Viridiana', however, Bunuel conflates these two movements - the Gothic as social allegory, and as site of released repressions. The film's infamous second half - in which Viridiana attempts to atone for a suicide by caring for beggars and outcasts, and her uncle's son's attempts to modernise the home - savagely mixes them up. The beggars, embodying a whole antheap of qualities, desires, realities the Spanish ruling class and bourgeoisie everywhere suppress, take over the mansion, mishandle its possessions, parody its civilising artefacts (food, music, painting, sculpture), a destructive Bacchic frenzy contemptuous of viewers - we may cheer when the meek inherit the earth, but a greater pack of brutal thugs, informing sneaks, loathesome lepers or frothing rapists you'll never see; while Don Jaime, for all his monstrosity, has a quiet grace absent from the other characters. His servants assume their own thuggish hierarchy when faced with the amoral vagrants, asserting their perceived superiority. The celestial Viridiana's initiation into the 'earthy' is not something anyone, whatever their politics, can buy.
It is wholly characteristic that Bunuel should couch this moral dynamite in one of his most visually beautiful films - the recurring Bunuel motifs (feet, ropes etc.; religious paraphernalia as bondage gear); the dense compositions, at once framing characters in their environment and mocking them; and the startling zooms out, from intimate close-ups on parts of the body to the shocking realisation that someone is always watching.
Movie Review: HEAVEN CAN WAIT
Summary: 4 Stars
Shot in black & white, spanish director Luis Bunuel's VIRIDIANA won the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Festival. VIRIDIANA is the first spanish movie of Bunuel since L'AGE D'OR and UN CHIEN ANDALOU, two Movie History classics. Silvia Pinal plays the character of Viridiana, a young girl about to take her vows as a nun. Just before taking this decision, she visits her uncle, played by the bunuelesque Fernando Rey, who falls in love with her because of her tremendous resemblance with his own wife who died during their wedding night. He tries to take advantage on her while she is sleeping but abandons this idea at the last minute. Viridiana decides then to stay at the family farm and take care of the poor people of the nearby village.
Unpitiful, the movie shows how Viridiana will be forced to abandon her mystic hopes to bring some good in this world. The beggars she has offered a home to are cheating on her and will almost rape her. The last scene of VIRIDIANA is masterfully ironic, a visual metaphor of the victory of materialism over spirituality only a genial Luis Bunuel has been able to create. Another scene which will stay in our memory and in Movie History is the recreation of La Cena by Leonardo da Vinci with the beggars in the role of the Christ and the Apostles. A great moment.
A movie zone No Respect.
Movie Review: Perverse but interesting
Summary: 4 Stars
I had not seen a Bunuel film for many years and the last one I saw was "Los Olvidados" which totally impressed me. Introduced to Bunuel in a film class with "Un Chien Andalou" I was a little disappointed with Vividiana. It is good but I felt a little uneven. The movie has some scenes that are terrific, some disgusting and some just ordinary. The story is about a woman who is about to become a full fledged nun but prior to receiving her vows she visits a wacky uncle. Her rich uncle is obsessed with her as she looks like his deceased wife. She fills a void in him and will go to any lengths to make Viridiana, as played by the Mexican actress Silvia Pinal, his "new " wife. Bizarre and twisted in his mind, the rich uncle, as played by Fernando Rey, a Vincent Price look a like, tries to seduce her "legitimately" then does the unthinkable. She is repulsed and unable to fulfuill her vows. As a penance she takes in a bunch of the strangest characters ever assembled for one movie since "Freaks". Street beggars, crippled and blind characters make for an interesting finale as they all take up residence in the luxurious accomodations of the uncle. The "Last Supper" scene is one that stays with you when the movie says fin, a classic section that is probably discussed in contemporary film classes. This is classic Bunuel but for my liking not his best work.The fact that the movie was banned in Spain upon it's release makes for a curious audience but remember this was 1961, not 2001.A good piece of film , if for nothing else to see the differeces in societies perceptions then and now.