Luis Bunuel - Viridiana (1961)
 
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055601

Language	Spanish
Subtitles	English
 
https://img143.imageshack.us/img143/4874/viridianaed2.jpg

Having been absent from Spain from the time of the Civil War, working in Hollywood and then making films in Mexico, Luis Buñuel returned to his native Spain in 1961, where his controversial films L’Âge d'Or (1930) and Las Hurdes (1933) were still banned, to make another film even while the dictator Franco remained in power. Rather than this being a weakening of his position as a left-wing opponent to the Fascist regime as some initially thought, Viridiana, despite its success in winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, would actually be considered just as controversial and blasphemous, causing such a stir in the Vatican that the Spanish dictator would order the sacking of those responsible for entering the film as the official Spanish entry at Cannes, and even demand that the film be completely destroyed.

The story of a nun who resists the lecherous advances of her uncle, renouncing her taking of the vows only after his death to look after his estate and give it over to the looking after of homeless beggars, Viridiana must have looked good on paper, because that is the only way you could imagine this ferocious attack on conservative Spanish and Catholic values getting past the censor. And indeed, early on the film does seem to support those traditional values, but subtly (and not so subtly) gradually undermining them as the film progresses until the whole thing collapses in the most shocking way imaginable.

A novice nun, Sister Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) reluctant to leave the convent for the temptations and evil of the outside world, nevertheless agrees to spend a few days on the estate of her uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), since he cannot be present himself at her taking of her vows. Her fears seem to be founded and small details on her uncle’s estate trouble her – a mischievous child, an uncle with an illegitimate son, Jorge (Francisco Rabal) – even the udders on a cow seem to be sexually suggestive to her. Troubled by what she sees, Viridiana sleeps with her cross and a crown of thorns by her bed, but sleepwalks in the night and pours ashes onto her uncle’s bed. It seems that Viridiana is right to be suspicious of her uncle, witnessing and being forced to participate in a bizarre fetishistic ceremony involving his wife’s wedding dress, the one she wore when she died on their wedding night. More than that, he wants Viridiana, who resembles the dead woman, to take her place as his wife and drugs her with the intention of raping her.

It’s certainly delightful to witness the more controversial elements of Viridiana’s attacks on the church and bourgeois morality, as they are undertaken with a childish delight at causing offence – whether it is through the imagery of crosses that hide knives, through the famous scene of the beggars in the pose of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the suggestive ménage-a-trois card game at the end of the film or one of the many other not-so-subtle attacks on Catholicism. But while they amuse and amaze at their audacity for the time the film was made, they would hardly offend too many people now. In fact, though it initially sounds ridiculous, I actually believe that there is some truth in the comment made by a Jesuit priest that can be found in the Cinéastes de Notre Temps extra feature on this DVD edition. The priest (and film critic), who teaches at the very same school where Buñuel was educated, observes that, despite Buñuel’s claim to be an atheist, there is evidence of a deeply moral and religious conviction behind all the bluster and anticlerical sentiments in his films. Buñuel’s famous pronouncement of “Thank God I’m an atheist” in this context could be seen as more than just a clever aphorism, and perhaps reveals even more than most believe. It’s this intriguing contradiction or ambiguity in Buñuel’s position that gives rise to the Viridiana’s more intriguing elements.

While such attacks on the church may no longer have the power to shock that they once did, Viridiana still has not lost any of its power, since the real strength of the film is in Buñuel’s depiction of human nature. That view is a deeply cynical one – or perhaps just a more realistic one than had been previously seen on movie screens up to that point – and he depicts it in all its twisted cruelty, perversity and contradictions, tapping uneasily into dark desires and normally unspoken impulses, much of it inspired by his own dreams and subconscious. Buñuel’s vision of mankind still stands up against even the bleakness of Harold Pinter, the darkest Hitchcock of Vertigo and even matches the weirdness and grotesquery of David Lynch. Everyone here is psychologically imbalanced, has neuroses and complexes and a dark, hidden nature. Even the housekeeper’s child has disturbing and suggestive nightmares of a huge black bull charging into her room. Throughout, Buñuel shows how people’s good intentions can be misguided, motivated by less noble impulses such as guilt (a very Catholic notion) or simply taken advantage of. Jorge’s pointless rescue of a single dog tied to a cart is one such example, but there are signs everywhere of goodness being perverted. Don Jaime claims that he was once a good man, a philanthropist who found that the world didn’t welcome or appreciate honesty and candour. His desire to marry Viridiana is also born out of a twisted perversion but genuine love for his dead wife. It’s evident also in the frankly masochistic nature of Viridiana’s religious paraphernalia and a deeply pious nature that only opens her up to seeing threats of temptation and evil in everything around her. Her idealistic good intentions for helping out homeless beggars also turns out to be misguided and taken advantage of by the realities of human nature, and by the end of the film, her submission to the earthy Jorge is the final admission of the failure of her religious ideals.

Most obviously, this subversion of the darker side – or should I just say human side – that lies below the surface of good acts and intentions is made evident in the scene of the beggars banquet itself, which, contrary to thoughts of blasphemy, is actually much less cynical than it appears and, as the Jesuit priest suggests, perhaps shows Buñuel’s humanistic side. By placing the beggars in a representation of the apostles, like Caravaggio’s use of prostitutes and beggars in his religious paintings, he robs the scene of its heavenly religious aura and reminds us of the human qualities that lie behind them. Is it blasphemous? Hardly. Iconoclastic, certainly - Buñuel seeking to offend and challenge people’s comfortable illusions and unthinking religious beliefs, exposing the hypocrisy that lies beneath them. These are real people, with real flaws and real problems and Buñuel uses real beggars rather than actors and makes us confront them. Does their presence on the screen and their behaviour offend us? How much are we willing to forgive their behaviour, their ugliness, their coarseness and their poverty? Are they also not just as welcome at God’s table? Well, since the film was promptly judged immoral and banned by the Vatican, evidently not. Buñuel could surely have expected nothing less.
 
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-----not my rip------

File Size (in bytes) ..: 1,565,151,232 bytes
Runtime (# of frames) .: 01:31:12 ( frames)

Video Codec ...........: XviD
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Video Bitrate .........: 2091 kb/s
Bits per Pixel ........: 0.305 bpp
B-VOP, N-VOP, QPel, GMC ......: [B-VOP]...[]...[]...[]

Audio Codec ...........: 0x2000(AC3, Dolby Laboratories, Inc) AC3
Sample Rate ...........: 48000 Hz
Audio bitrate .........: 192 kb/s [2 channel(s)] CBR audio
Interleave ............: 96 ms
No. of audio streams ..: 1



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