"Why? It's No Stranger Than Anything Else." (24 Hours of Buñuel, Part 2)

(BACK TO PART ONE)

Nazarín (1959, 94 min) (rent/buy)

I almost feel like I know less about this movie having seen it.  It came without subtitles, that doesn't help.  Nazarín is a serious work (at least its actors - even, sigh, the midget - are serious-mannered), it might be a contemplation on how unrewarding selflessness can be, a demonstration of how no good deed goes unpunished, a Christ parable, maybe.

The title character is a handsome, kind priest who occupies a barely furnished room (the entrance is, for some reason, not a door but a window) in a building (ironically?) called "The Inn of Heroes".  He takes in an injured prostitute (I'm assuming she's a prostitute, she wears kabuki-like make-up, she's a painted lady), and she sets fire to his few belongings.  A worksite at which he spends five minutes erupts into violence moments after he's dismissed.  He roams the countryside, winds up in a plague-ridden town, later winds up under arrest.  The two women who follow him around worshipfully - a tormented wife who has attempted suicide, and that same, cleaned-up prostitute - wind up in the same circumstances they would have had they never met him (back in an unhappy marriage, in prison).

Without speaking Spanish, though, I'm really not sure what this preacher is preaching.

There are some striking scenes/images, a sickbed vision twists a solemn painting of Jesus into a laughing clown, a distorted fantasy where the wife bites something off her husband.  I don't know what the act of accepting a pineapple at the end is supposed to mean, but I wouldn't be surprised if the object was all rind and no fruit.

Most of what's missing from Buñuel's filmography (as far as legal, domestically released DVDs are concerned) comes from his prolific Mexican period.   This small sample of work from then has proved a mixed bag, but there are films referred to reverently - El and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, especially - that I'd very much like to see.  They, along with a subtitled Nazarín (which won the "International Prize" at Cannes), would make a very attractive Eclipse set.  Please?

From here on out, the only film we'll be missing will be Tristana (1970).

The Young One (1960, 95 min) (rent/buy)

"It's a waste of bad whiskey."

An African-American musician is accused of rape while on tour.  He takes refuge on an island that serves as a private game reserve, runs afoul of its caretaker.

Whoa, an earnest racial drama.  How'd this come from? 

According to Peter Evans' commentary, both this and Robinson Crusoe were collaborations with the same blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and producer.  This was a looser lit adaptation; Peter Matthiessen's two-man black/white short story "Travellin' Man" is opened up to include a less flexible bigot, a priest, and the title character, an uneducated pubescent girl.  Buñuel's obvious interests point to those last two characters, but the main play here is man's rationalized, shifting morality.

Good, because the racial stuff is predictably dated, the scene where the musician teaches the girl Jive 101 painful.  The atmosphere is predatory, the practical matter of whether or not the musician poses a threat is teased out just enough, the flashback that puts him on the lam is artfully, economically done.

The girl, Evvie, is kept a blank slate.  Well, she's kept a girl.  (She doesn't even know her own age, but we're told she's older than twelve.)  She's made a victim, the film shamelessly sexualizes her, the plot ultimately offers her up as a sacrifice and it's up to the audience to acknowledge the tragedy of that.  Evvie's only given a single scene to show that she's internalized any trauma, messing her hair, uglifying herself after the first move is made on her.  Mostly Buñuel rubs our face in her innocence, she harvests honey, she hopscotches in high heels.

The Young One and Bergman's Virgin Spring shared special mentions at Cannes in a strong year (the Golden Palm went to La Dolce Vita, the Jury Prize to L'Avventura).

Viridiana (1961, 91 min) (rent/buy)

"It's neither a masquerade nor a whim."

The director's career embarks upon that rarest of things, a potent third act.  If his earliest work never disassociated itself from Dali, if his middle period was - despite its great works, despite its personal moments - too filled with workaday, on-contract popular entertainments, then it's from this point that Buñuel (in his sixties!) finds the freedom to form a cinema of wholly personal concern.  Viridiana was his return to Europe and it was a giant political prank.

The film happens in two halves.  Viridiana (Silvia Pival) is a would-be nun about to take her vows.  Before doing so, she is encouraged to visit her benefactor, the wealthy, distant uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey).  Jaime has designs on the girl - she looks exactly like his late wife ("You even walk like your aunt.") - and convinces V. that he has raped her in her sleep in hopes that will bind her to him.  The second half sees the woman using the Don's estate as a makeshift homeless shelter.  This does not go well.

Here too we have the answer for something I'd wondered at the outset of this ‘thon.  How relevant would Buñuel's attacks on religion and class be some forty years later to someone raised in a largely secular society built on the presumption of a fluid class system?  Well, where and whenever you go, people is people, and what Buñuel savages are people.  For all the potshots he takes at organized religion - and there's enough here that the Vatican got all a-tizzy (mostly mocking its pomp and its symbolism:  the recurring blare of Handel's Messiah, the switchblade cross, the beggars' recreation of the Last Supper) - the director has Viridiana's Mother Superior correctly identify the target:  Pride.

He condemns both V. (described as "rotten with piety") and Jaime as living in parallel isolated worlds, he on his lonely, unkept estate, she in her convent.  They're both beholden to rigid ideas, hers is to do her dead savior's work on Earth, his is to recreate his dead wife.  Buñuel stops short of moralizing, he leaves those judgments to the viewer, but he will happily make everyone involved look foolish.  Jaime could be an obvious, creepy character.  But as Rey plays him, he's more pathetic than anything else.  Buñuel gives the uncle his own fetishes and fantasies; the director says he had childhood dreams about drugging the Queen of Spain and snuggling with her, he would dress in his mother's clothes, he probably couldn't keep his foot fetish from his audience if he wanted to.  The old man is wrong and hurtful, but he is hapless and lonely.

Buñuel denies V. her determined selflessness.  He casts a striking blonde - Pival will reappear as Satan a few films later - and takes us behind closed doors to watch her undress.  Denial of the flesh is self-delusional, reads so right there on Pival's gams.  The film is cruel to V.  She is mock-raped, then there's a real attempted rape, and finally, when she makes the decision to share her body, the situation is depersonalized.  Even her compromises are compromised.  But she follows this path of suffering by blindly refusing the reality of her situation and the reality of human nature.

Buñuel's beggars are well-drawn (at least they have identities) but they're never meant to be anything more than human.  It's tempting to say that his sympathies lay there - what's more obscene, ruining a $10,000 tablecloth?  or keeping a $10,000 tablecloth locked away, unused?  or that a $10,000 tablecloth even exists? - and they're fun in an earthy, unrestrained way.  They do not mean harm.  But their revelry is unsustainable, and they are unable to control themselves in vital ways.  An injured member of the party adopts a dove with a broken wing; later, there's nothing left but feathers.

A middle way might be offered in the form of the uncle's illegitimate son, played by the same actor who was the priest in Nazarín.  The character is introduced as a selfish, suave playboy.  But he wants to modernize the mansion, farm its fallow fields.  He does not begrudge Viridiana her folly, even engages in his own futile act of kindness (those poor dogs).

Ashley Beaumont - Shimmy Doll (mp3)

When Buñuel, at the end, forges a union between his failed saint, the bastard son, and a maid, he seems to be handing the estate -Spain, perhaps - to a new post-religious class.  In the interview on the DVD, Pival says Buñuel convinced her that the last scene would lead to good things for her character because for the first time in her life Viridiana would go on to do something useful - working the land, raising a family.  But the final shot pulls back through a mostly empty manor, theirs the only lit room.  A rockabilly tune echoes through the rooms, begging everyone to "shake all your cares away."

The only moral to the story was:  When you hire Luis Buñuel, you will probably get a Luis Buñuel film.  Fascist Franco was looking to reconnect his country's culture to the world; Spain's most renowned film director was working in exile.  The dictator reached out.  Franco's censor approved this script with only one major change - a change which made the ending less explicit yet more lurid - but Buñuel and his leftist producers snuck certain elements through (the Last Supper recreation, for instance, supposedly just said something like "Here there is the image of Da Vinci's Last Supper," as if it were an insert shot).  After the film screened at Cannes, where it shared the Palme d'Or, religious outcry convinced Franco to ban the film.  It was not screened in Spain until 1977.

Buñuel had not abandoned the Mexican film industry, this was a Mexican co-production, and while Franco stomped out prints at home, Viridiana survived elsewhere.

The Exterminating Angel (1962, 93 min) (rent/buy)

"Only by dispassionate analysis can we get to the bottom of our matter."

Eight of Buñuel's final ten films have been released on DVD by Criterion, originator of the audio commentary track.  Not one of these Criterion releases includes a commentary track.  Addition by subtraction:  The history and contextualization in the tracks I've sampled so far here as been valuable, the analysis has been iffy.  There's this temptation for critics to run wild, the director makes this easy.

Instead, with each release, Criterion includes appropriate excerpts from José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent's book Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel.  It's so much better to hear the director, when asked to explain certain scenes or images from his films, respond, "I don't know."  Why is there a bear cub at the party in The Exterminating Angel?  "It's interesting to see a bear walking into a drawing room."  So there.

In The Exterminating Angel, a group of wealthy people meet for a dinner party and find that, for no apparent reason, no one is able to leave.  All your usual Lord of the Flies societal breakdowns occur, there's hunger, violence, shit, and death.  But it's in a posh parlor, there's not so much as a doorway holding anyone in.  The film's credits claim it's based on a stage play that doesn't exist.  So there.

Angel cries out for explanation, oh, it's a parable of this or that, but a lot of what makes it work is its inexplicability.  The crisis eases its way in on the heels of courtesy and conformity, but obviously goes beyond that.  You want to put it all at the feet of the incapable upper class - and some of this is a fine excuse to force them to confront their own stink, for once - but the event is both real and supernatural.  The servants abandon the party early on without knowing why, like animals who sense a natural catastrophe (or like, as one of the guests complains, rats deserting a sinking ship).  People outside the house cannot get in, and they have no reason, either.  There's no electric barrier.  People just lose their ability/will to cross a plane.

Buñuel drags in an assortment of irrational elements.  There are time hiccups, both noticed and unnoticed.  There's some wonderful, unconnected dialogue that recalls L'Age d'Or.  Mason hand signals.  A feverish dream of a disembodied hand, illusions of the Pope in a painting, a tender bit of sheep-nuzzling.  The Kabbalah!  It's almost a shame the woman who brings chicken feet in her purse winds up applying them to the situation.

It's a Twilight Zone set-up, and it's the sort of movie we'd mock were it to come from a self-serious poof like M. Night Shyamalan.  But Buñuel is here to sigh and make fun, not to make sense or trick you.  There are laughs, but there's also a great unease, as if a plague of inability is about to be set loose.  Irrational circumstances are contagious.  The circular logic that solves this event - a solution that I've seen used in more logic-concerned time-loop science fiction scenarios - may send the world spiraling into a larger such event.  Who knows?  I'm just gonna sit here waiting for my sheep to show.

Diary of a Chambermaid (1964, 98 min) (rent/buy)

"They're better when they suffer."

Buñuel ends his first French film in 34 years by having a right-wing anti-Semitic child-rapist and murderer lead a chant praising the man who had banned L'Age d'Or back in 1930.

This one's a dud for me.  Based on a turn-of-the-century novel but updated to the pre-WWII era, the film concerns a Parisian maid, Celestine, who joins the staff at an estate in the country.  Her employers have a pretty standard list of eccentricities - the Mr. chases staff tail and gets into petty territorial bickering with his neighbor, the Mrs. spends her time counting money and protecting expensive, fragile possessions.  The Mrs.' elderly father has, whoa-ho! - a woman's boot fetish!  He's amusing enough... but not nearly as interesting as the director's own fascination with the run in his actress' stocking.

There's some very tired comedy of manners.  The Mrs. asks her priest how she can best satisfy her randy husband's needs.  He sometimes wants sex twice a week!  The priest tells her that, even for vigorous men, twice a week is too much!  But the important thing, he says, is that the Mrs. must never derive any pleasure from the activity.  Whoa-ho!

The atmosphere - pre-war, masters/servants, country estate - too strongly recalls The Rules of the Game (I have never derived any pleasure from that activity).  And hey, Renoir adapted the same source novel almost twenty years earlier while working in Hollywood.  I'm sure there's a political metaphor in how our maid is both attracted to and repulsed by a fascist gardener.

One of the best things, and possibly the worst thing, about the movie is its star, Jeanne Moreau.  Moreau is captivating and beautiful and likeable and... so good at hiding her characters' thoughts that we never really get to know Celestine.  Tres feminin, mui maddening.  I'm assuming, back there, that she is attracted and repulsed, because that's more interesting than the alternative, that she's pretending to be attracted just to dig up dirt on the guy.  But that's just one little plotline.  When Celestine makes choices, we aren't in on the logic (or non-logic) behind any of them.  The script's at fault for not giving her enough chances to drop her guard.  At the end we might learn what makes her tick, but if that's it, then she's the least scheming social climber in the history of cinema.

There are some moving scenes, there's a butterfly getting shot by a rifle, an oddly staged conversation with a priest along a noisy street.  The shot of snails crawling on a young girl's legs is so creepily beautiful that it upstages the entire rest of the movie.  Diary of a Chambermaid was the first of six films on which Buñuel collaborated with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière; they get better.

(CONTINUE TO PART THREE)

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