The decade of the seventies of the last century meant the last couple of quinquenniums in the filmography of the giant spanish filmmaker Buñuel, who had already traveled a long way, from Europe to Mexico, and after many years there, he definitely returned to the old continent.
The Milky Way (1969), corrosive look to the Christian religious world, was his previous exercise, he had already settled definitively to shoot European productions, began the final stage of his career, the French stage, with actors mostly of that nationality and repeating the beautiful Catherine Denueve as his protagonist, after
Belle de jour (1967). One of the greatest confessed references in the director's cinema, Benito Pérez Galdós, is the author of the novel that inspires the Buñuel film on this occasion, the bizarre and tragic story of an attractive young woman, an orphan in the care of an older man, who falls in love and obsesses with the young woman, makes her his wife, and at the same almost his caregiver; but that union, being she prone to other romances, and he extremely jealous, will bring tragic consequences, for both characters, physical and psychological mutilations. Among his actors, Buñuel would also count the great Fernando Rey again, in a film that although it is not usually counted among his most exalted works, it is undoubtedly an important piece in his oeuvre.
Two women approach a boarding school, they are Saturna (Lola Gaos) and Tristana (Deneuve), they go to see the son of the first, Saturn (Jesus Fernandez), deaf and dumb. They return to house, where Saturna is the servant, the gentleman is Don Lope (Fernando Rey), tutor of Tristana, whose mother, deceased, entrusted her. The aristocrat Don Lope, in economic problems, courts his protege, who seems to correspond him. Diseases begin to torment Don Lope, Tristana takes care of him, but she longs for more freedom, she wants to go out, she does it furtively, and she meets a painter, Horacio (Franco Nero), with whom an idyll gets concreted. But when the artist finds out that she has a husband, her guardian, he gets angry; Don Lope in turn suspects Tristana's love affairs, but the girl already acts stubbornly, defying the tutor, and even plans to escape, to flee with Horacio. After confronting both men, Horacio and the girl leave, they spend two years quickly, until one day, without warning, Tristana returns, with Horacio, but seriously ill, a disease that makes it necessary to amputate her one leg, and in that state, she returns to the residence of Don Lope. Horacio tries to be with her, but her temperament has made her cold, distant, reproaches him while her husband's health declines. At the end, a seriously ill Don Lope requires the doctor, Tristana only pretends to call the medic, he dies.
The film is based on the avatars of an attractive young girl who is left in the care of a tutor, a female character who has been orphaned, in the care of an older man, a similar subject that we had already appreciated in Buñuel in The Young one (1960), and warmly in Viridiana (1961), the filmmaker seems to have liked that origin for his character. And on the other side, Don Lope, an individual who is capable of letting a thief escape, to whom he assigns the role of the weak, whom he must help in whatever situation, and with that excuse he bases an in-the-long-run sterile anarchy. The old man is a point of contradictions, against the police, because they represent the system, against the clergy, the Christian church and other canons of society, something that obviously has to do with the director's own affiliations. This position, which is alien to reality, is reflected in the pyrrhic reluctance to haggle costs when auctioning his properties, to accept his reality, which is that he is in bankruptcy, we heard him utter "cures in my house, never", "I know that Christ was the first socialist ", we heard him deny the vile money and the slavery of the human to it, but finally we will see that he never detaches himself from what he tries to repudiate. He rejects a duel for being at first blood, something he considers to be little serious and unworthy of his sponsorship, he is an old-fashioned individual, aspiring to be a rebel, a progressive, without much success in being so. He is an old personage, his age and his attitude are reflected from his first appearance, when he directs compliments to a girl, she calling him old; the role is established from the beginning, the condition of old that will weigh on Don Lope in the whole film. Also, the characterization and makeup work accentuate that character of almost senescence. Naturally, Fernando Rey, always distinguished, always splendid, as Buñuel would say, had become an alter ego of the director, who reflects through the actor his soul of a certain anarchist impulse, of nonconformity, with everything that society represents, has a particular idea of freedom that will take shape in the director, until reaching the delirious state of The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Jealousy is now one of the pullers of the picture, a subject not very assiduous in the director actually, jealousy that drives the old man crazy, who feels cheated by two young people -it is sickly his way, about an apparently agonizing Tristana says "she does not escape from me anymore, if she enters my house again she does not come out"-, and that will have, indirectly, the tragic consequence of the amputation of the leg. "An honest woman, with a broken leg and in her house," he says, the filmmaker plays with the symbolism, which is brutally captured in the film.
The director uses the resource of connecting a sequence with another, a reality or moment with another, between his two central characters, as when we see Don Lope, reunited with his aristocratic comrades, dedicating praises to the woman, appearing next the motivation of the praises, Tristana; then, while the girl kisses her artist lover, we see the old tutor suddenly rise from his bed, restless and alert, as if he feels that the object of his desire is deceiving him. In this way, he contrasts the actions of one and the other, Tristana and Don Lope, following one's actions, the other person's actions, linking and drawing parallels between their paths, their characters that are oppositely varying. And actually there is an opposite journey in the paths of the protagonists, whose contrast is reinforced with that narrative resource, the character of her gets acquiring vigor, shet defends herself, she already responds to the constrictions of Lope; there are severe changes in their humanities, she is no longer the submissive young girl, her character, after the mutilation, has soured. He even invites priests to his home to enjoy chocolate, a theme that Buñuel said was very much his in real life; even the painter, initially without greater elegance, appears well dressed in the final segment. In that sense also, it will be interesting to appreciate one of the eternal watchwords in the audiovisual language of the filmmaker, the feet, adopting new ways now. The slippers -an obvious Buñuelian allegory for the connoisseur of his work- become a conductive thread, a vehicle through which the relationship of protected and guardian, wife and husband evolves. She takes care of him first, carrying his slippers and putting them on, but when she reaches independence, when her new character and temperament begin to manifest, she throws his slippers to the trash. As it had become usual by then, Buñuel's camera has acquired sobriety, we could call it maturity, gliding calmly, going through environments and following actions, often acquires the perspective of the characters themselves, other times focusing on details, such as more than once we will see, with the food. The camera behaves particularly with neatness in the sequence of Tristana in the knees of Don Lope, like a girl, increasingly distant from the old man. We have zero music on the feature, no musical accompaniment, only a few trickle sounds, and diegetic sounds are the auditory accompaniment of the film. And we have a new member in the animal stock of the director, the canids, which will repeatedly appear, having one of them rabies, perhaps a wink to the dog at the end of The Young and the Damned (1950).
It returns the figure of the orthopedic leg, like the doll of Miroslava in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1954), it is very appreciable to be able to notice, always, a cinematography as compact as Buñuel's, always coherent and always faithfully continuing the path of his audiovisual language. Plastically manifests another of the director's obsessions, his particular portraits of Christian figures, which we will now have in the image represented by Tristana, leaning suggestively on a statue, apparently of a Supreme Pontiff, a characteristic Christian representation by the filmmaker. The director wanted to shoot unequivocally in Toledo, territory known for him, the filmmaker rejoices in showing the streets, plastically sinuous, zigzagging, like the interior paths of the characters, even Buñuel asserted that this was the only one of his films that could not have been filmed anywhere else than in Spain. By day, with light, and dark in the night, shady, the streets of Toledo, with their old architecture, house the characters, being exemplary that dark frame of old Don Lope retiring, beaten, humiliated, deprived of his toy, his object of desire. Thus, we have the detail, and returning with Tristana, of her always deciding between two options, generating ambivalences with grapes, columns, streets, she repeatedly rejects offers of marriage from Horacio, she has uncertain relationship with deaf and dumb Saturn; yes, her actions are sinuous, like Toledo streets, always crossroads, two roads, like Tristana and her taste for choosing between two options. It is also ambivalent their relationship, being both guardian and husband, being her wife but at the same time almost a maid, in a story where the servants have importance in their respective sordid universes, now it is Saturna, as in her moment it was Ramona, in Viridiana. Buñuel claimed that, thinking about it years later, he would have liked to have two different actresses to embody the two moments of Tristana, before and after the loss of her leg, a desire that will later materialize in That obscure object of desire (1977). Surrealism unfolds only in the final sequence, the only moment where the linearity of his story breaks, everything has been consummated, we have a bunch of rapidly concatenated sequences that summarize a good part of the film -novety in the director this resource-, and ending with the head of Don Lope again in the bell, a bell that acquires another meaning, since it sounded at the beginning, it is prologue and epilogue at the same time. In the end, Don Lope calls the clerics to his home, they drink chocolate, she, completely ruthless, ends up provoking his death, and in the novel, by the way, did not kill him, it is a detail of the director, who reflects his personal touch of individuals tasting chocolate, as the filmmaker in his life liked to do, with sugar cubes, one more time, the male character is a reflection, to some extent an alter ego of the filmmaker. The actors, both Rey and Deneuve, are of course at the height of the director, demonstrating why they were in those years his usual performers, in a film fully embedded in the final stage of Spanish, his french stage, a film that wanted to shoot a decade ago in Mexico, something that was frustrated after the scandal raised by Viridiana, but that then came to see the light. The great Buñuel had reached his final maturity, his style reached its final form, the final exercises of Calanda's genius would come.
Buñuel's latest film triad, which begins with the film now commented, forms a triptych among the best known by the filmmaker, the twilight of the director, with which he would reach the final shape in the long evolution of his cinematographic style. In this opportunity Buñuel is responsible for the development of the script, himself with the collaboration, of course, of his ever loyal Jean-Claude Carrière, a script that ran for Best Original Screenplay in the Oscars of that year, a film that won the statuette for Best Foreign Film, probably the most internationally awarded work and one of the most widely disseminated. Vigorous surrealism flows throughout the film, in which again uses the filmmaker a fractured narrative structure in which he combines indiscriminately and in a way almost impossible to discern, reality and dream, fantasy and reality, memories or present. Always being loyal to his winks, to his figures, to his language, presents to us the filmmaker the simple story of a group of bourgeois who, due to real or unreal reasons, can not hold a dinner, and the film will be simply the journey through these delirious adventures. An already completely settled again in Europe Buñuel, with all the freedom and amplitude of resources in french soil, already working with his final acting team, presents one of his most reputable works.
Now, another one of the figures of all the life in Buñuel, the aristocrats, returns to be center of the film, but with new and particular nuances of his, final worries or topics arise in the film director, now there are also politicians, politicians who traffic cocaine. On this occasion, the police returns to be embodied in Buñuel's film, no longer with the loathing of Don Lope in Tristana (1970), but it is not safe from being ridiculed by his office with the implausible arrest of all the aristocrats; similarly, there are other issues, there is terrorism, in the form of the girl, growth and demographic explosion, chimeric freedoms that reach their peak in the next film, The Phantom of Liberty (1974), are diversified in the end the usual topics of the director. But returning to the bourgeois, these are shown, in their actions, ruinous, despicable, of dubious morals, strutting their artificial sophistication, their discreet charm, as when Thévenot presumed his knowledge in the consumption and preparation of beverages. Traffickers, beings who practice adultery among themselves, reaches the climax of the topic of the bourgeoisie, already outlined in The Golden Age (1930), in The Exterminating Angel (1962), mixed with the surreal delirium of the final stage, of the final maturity of the Iberian. We will see funny moments of the experiences of these bourgeois, we have Florence, always hungry for vices, alcohol, marijuana, denying her addiction, but always with her drunkenness, is at times a vaudeville parade of the miseries and absurdities, delirium of these aristocrats; but beware, that entertainment is not the crux of the film. In the same way, the very particular religious vision of Buñuel will again be reflected in the figure of the Monseñor, a prominent religious who works as a gardener, forgetting even his patron at a certain moment his status as a cleric. To continue enriching his always particular view of the Christian religion, we have the powerful figure of the Monsignor, meeting in an unthinkable way the very murderer of his parents, when he was a child, now being a gardener -like the one who ended the life of his parents-, and the priest, in a sign that his humanity surpasses his figure as a man of God, shoots who made him an orphan. And of course, we have the very brief but present sequence of Muni -the actress of whom Buñuel said that in France became something like his pet, an assiduous in his final films- asserting that he hates Christ, an assertion that does not get answered, the priest pushes it away, leaving that door open. Buñuel was a filmmaker who in his cinema, almost above all things, always expressed frustrations, he was always interested in frustrations, he had no problem affirming it in one of his many interviews, and in that sense is exemplary and referential the amour fou never consummated in The Golden Age, now we have the frustration of the sexual act that is not consumed twice, the Thévenot, and the adulterers Simone and Rafael. In addition to of course, dinner, dinner that never happens.
It is probably Buñuel's film in which the narrative structure is more fractured, a constant dislocation of the perspective entangles the narrative articulation, through insertions, insertions of dreams, dreams that are presented as such, or memories, or games with visions of the dead, everything is woven and fused with reality; neither police nor militia are safe from the corrosive Buñuelian surrealism, the military interrupts another dinner, smoke marijuana, and then everything is interrupted again, everything is apparently part of another dream. The commissar, Thévenot, the sergeant, the lieutenant, Don Rafael, another soldier, all of them, thanks to the freedom to refer dreams, become escape routes from the linearity of the story, a universe where the imaginary and South American Miranda exists, where ignorances sometimes, vilifications as well, are pointed by the aristocrats. Buñuel was already experienced, experienced in breaking that fine dividing line of reality and onirism, in mixing both worlds, being a pioneer in his filmography in this aspect, Belle de jour, but never showed the mastery that now exhibits in that particular section of his narrative style. Dreams, fantasies, sordid memories, and all convoluted, dreams inside dreams, is undoubtedly one of the most courageous and challenging stagings of the director, which tests the viewer himself, he definitely could no longer detach himself from that kind of narration, and the almost total freedom granted to structure his audiovisual story in this way. Thus, everything happens without explaining anything, because it is certainly not necessary, we do not delve into the psychologies of the characters, because Buñuel was never characterized by delving into the psyches of his protagonists; the circumstances, the context, often acquire preponderance over humans in Buñuel's cinema. Technically, there were certain amenities that technology allowed for the first time, it was a more placid shooting for Buñuel and that by then, with 72 years on his back, did not hurt, he could have more control of the camera thanks to new video controls, he was able to control the audio through headphones, he could shoot seated. He also uses a resource, different sounds in different situations will interrupt the viewing, they will not allow us to fully listen to character dialogues, dialogues that could help us understand their humanities, especially in the final section, with the politicians involved, a resource that increases the interest of the spectator, and that is certainly novel to appreciate in the filmmaker. We also appreciate a camera that behaves with great sobriety, serenely wanders with travellings some rooms but has no abrupt movements or camera follow-ups in hand, as in previous years; it develops now with parsimonious sobriety. He finally settled down with his acting company, the formidable Fernando Rey at the head, the beautiful muse of Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, also briefly again appears his loyal friend Michel Piccoli as Prime Minister, the acting elegance that missed the director in The Exterminating Angel, has it finally and fully. In the end, they all return to walk, that's how the film gets closed, walking aimlessly, without destiny or more explanation, everything could have been quietly the dream of some protagonist. Some will say that it is the director's major film, whose oeuvre is so gigantic, in quantitative as well as qualitative abundance, that this assertion is a bit haphazard, but there is no doubt that it is a major sample of the cinema that this extraordinary artist knew to produce. Simply unmissable filmic exercise.
