Revisit:
Virdiana
Dir: Luis Buñuel
1961
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
Luis Buñuel's Viridiana isn't as outwardly surreal as some of his other work, yet it sustains an alien feeling throughout, almost entirely due to its bizarre narrative arc. Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is a novitiate, almost ready to take her vows and happy to do so, who gets word that her uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), is near death. While Jaime has financially supported Viridiana for a long time, he has never gotten to know his niece and she is surprisingly adamant, at least as far as imminent nuns go, in her lack of sympathy and interest. Still, Mother Superior insists, so off she goes to Jaime's large estate, where she meets a man who has, since the death of his wife, lived in near solitude, crippled by self-imposed loneliness. Upon first meeting him, she tells him it's too late for them to have any sort of a meaningful personal connection, and proceeds to interact with him as politely as she can manage.
Viridiana's coldness towards her benefactor is meant to seem odd, her sincere piousness doesn't succeed in masking her dissociative nature, exemplified by her ability to not care about her uncle and, later, to not pick up on her own charges' complete lack of interest in the brand of saintly life she's trying to sell them. Jaime slowly and sadly falls in love with his niece, her uncanny resemblance to his dead wife being one of his main triggers. When he realizes she has no interest in him, he conspires with his maid to drug her in order to forcibly disqualify her from the Order by "taking her virtue," forcing her to stay with him due simply to her lack of prospects. In the end, he grows mortified with himself and is unable to execute the plan, which he confesses to her the following morning. Viridiana, horrified and upset, doesn't accept his apology and leaves immediately. Jaime shortly hangs himself with a jump rope. He leaves the estate to her and his estranged playboy son, Jorge, who immediately sets to work trying to turn the land into a farm.
Upon learning of Jaime's death, Viridiana opts out of her vows and, almost immediately, steps out from under the shadow Buñuel has been consistently covering her in throughout the course of the film. Her face is no longer obscured in darkness but glowing in bright lights; in shunning the church she comes to live a pious life in the manner she had originally been hoping for, converting the barn of the estate into a boarding house for the town's destitute and sickly residents. She sets about to create a life for them where they can eventually learn to take care of themselves. Everyone is assigned a job and contributes to the benefit of the overall group; as long as they do that and pray, they are welcome. The issue is that none of these people have any interest in Viridiana's churchy model of life, they just want to eat, drink, and screw and have a place to sleep at the end of the night. They go along with it, embracing her naïveté warm-heartedly, and occasionally reproaching one another when someone slips; there are some bad seeds, but the system stays together.
The film's most famous sequence occurs near the end, when Viridiana and Jorge leave the grounds to meet with a lawyer in town. The shelter's tenants first break into the mansion with the idea of looking around and wind up having a bacchanalian destruction derby. Near the beginning of the sequence, as the debate of whether or not to go inside is hashed out, the inevitability of what will follow is inescapable, but even so, as you watch the scenario play out, you don't doubt (entirely, anyway) that a debate is going on, and not just being enacted out of a sense of wishfully exculpatory ceremony. The vagabonds' intents and the eventual results of their actions are not the same; they can not help their sense of irresponsibility any more than anyone else can repress their own natures.
The film was branded as blasphemous by the Vatican and banned in Spain, the country that produced it, for 16 years following its completion in 1961. The biggest factor in this controversy is the infamous reenactment of The Last Supper that occurs during the big destructive sequence at the end, a "photograph" of the banquet taken by one of the beggars by lifting her dress to flash all of the posing, drunken revelers. This is not by any means the most blasphemous sequence in the film; it is simply the most obvious and gleeful of its provocations. There is an earlier sequence that really drives the film's point home: Viridiana and the beggars pray in a field while Jorge and his men set to work on some construction on the house nearby. The intercutting between Viridiana, eyes closed, hands pressed together and a man sawing through a piece of wood says everything - one of these two things does something.
Viridiana's more disturbing qualities are contained in its exploration of human coldness. Jorge, disgusted at the sight of a dog being forced, by way of a rope tied around its neck, to run along with a horse-drawn cart, stops the driver and pressures him into selling it to him. As he unties it from the cart and takes it with him, another cart passes by in the background; another dog tied to the back. Earlier, the maid assists Jaime in drugging Viridiana, despite not believing the bullshit explanation he provides her with for why he wants to do it, and we are forced to watch him deal with the implication of what he is planning to do, and to skin-crawlingly explore the possibility, before he reaches the conclusion to stop. The maid's daughter continues to jump rope with the same one that Jaime used to hang himself with, after the fact. Life goes on.
In all of these cases, as in Viridiana's wish to have nothing to do with her uncle at the beginning and the beggars' destruction of the home near the end, we are seeing enactments of selfish obliviousness, not monstrous greed or hatred. People have their own internal drives that are divorced from the religiously ascribed vision of an ideally lived life, and these conflicts between personal and moral interests, and the variation between people regarding the degree of importance they place on these conflicts, are at the heart of the film. In the end, Viridiana is forced to face some ugly truths about the world and to re-evaluate her approach to interacting with it. It is arguable, and Buñuel certainly makes the argument, that having been forced to deal with these truths, rather than evading them through sequestering herself in a nunnery, in having to work rather than pray, she winds up a better person than she was at the beginning. It doesn't feel good, but it's pretty beautiful.
by Andrei Alupului