This movie, perhaps one of Buñuel’s most accessible, tells a straight-laced story of the human condition, filled with sexual obsession and repression, religious ardor and its bawdy parody, and Buñuel’s wicked wit.
Viridiana (Silvia Pinal, a Mexican actress something of a composite Kim Novak and Catherine Deneuve) is a pious young woman preparing to take vows to enter a religious order. She is urged against her will by her convent’s Mother Superior to visit Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), a wealthy uncle she has met only once, but who has provided for her maintenance and education.
Don Jaime is a lonely old man who lives with his housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano), her daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) and his small household staff on a large and long neglected rural estate. Don Jaime leads the life of a male Miss Havisham, haunted by the memory of his bride—Viridiana’s aunt—who died on their wedding night. He keeps her trousseau in a trunk at the foot of their bed, and obsessively tries to slip into articles of her white wedding attire, her veil, corset and silken shoes.
Viridiana’s strong resemblance to her aunt fires Don Jaime’s desire to keep her with him on his estate: if not as his wife, then as the focus of his obsessive veneration, a picture of purity framed between bare breasted caryatids supporting his fireplace mantle. In a sense, the manor house with its barred windows would be a ‘convent’ of his obsession.
It is not difficult to imagine how this intensely self-absorbed, bizarre prospect would horrify anyone. When Viridiana declines to stay, Don Jaime hangs himself with Rita’s jump rope, high from a tree outside the house.
Guilty, confused and ‘changed’, Viridiana decides to stay at this ‘convent’ rather than return to the one she left, to try to find practical ways to lead a devout life. The household expands when Don Jaime’s bastard son Jorge (Francisco Rabal), who inherits the estate, turns up with a girlfriend Lucía (Victoria Zinny).
Jorge wants to improve the estate’s building and grounds; Viridiana wants to improve herself and others by her example. In trying to secularize her religious practice, Viridiana becomes a ‘limousine liberal’ when she invites a motley crew of beggars and homeless men and women to join her in a community at the estate.
In the same spirit, Jorge notices a dog tied under a moving carriage and asks its owner why it does not ride in the carriage. ‘It’s a dog,’ the owner replies. Jorge buys the dog to rescue it from callous humanity, and as he walks away self-satisfied by his act, another carriage passes by behind him with a dog trotting tethered beneath it.
Like Viridiana’s notion of secularizing the ideal she envisions in her religious practice, her own project backfires when smudged with greasy human fingerprints.
One day when left at the estate to their own devices, the beggars decide to explore the life of the temporarily absent owners. A scene of beggar women admiring a fine linen tablecloth dissolves to a glass of wine knocked sideways, splashing across that same fine tablecloth spread on an aristocratic table groaning under a true beggars’ banquet.
In a sense, the tableau of this Bruegelian beanfeast mocks the pretention that fostered it when the diners pose to be ‘photographed’ aping Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic painting The Last Supper. But rather than blaspheme, the scene offers a folk rendering of a well known religious image—as drunken Americans might recreate the iconic images of the Flag-Raising at Iwo Jima or Washington Crossing the Delaware.
This beggar’s banquet and the pose they strike is shockingly funny but, as in the rest of the film no less than its conclusion, Buñuel seems to be saying over and over that he is more interested in observing and celebrating human nature than in making fun of human institutions like the church or the Franco dictatorship, or of humans in themselves.
The film stands out most notably for its independence of thought and spirit.
Buñuel, who had been living in exile from the Franco dictatorship in Mexico and briefly in the United States since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, enraged other exiles and anti-fascists when he returned to Franco’s Spain to make this film in 1961.
The film passed Franco’s censors and won acclaim at Cannes. However, its allegedly blasphemous content outraged the Vatican, prompting the Franco government, with its close ties to the church, to withdraw its support and ban its screening in Spain.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMyyBVX6DAk
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