Film Review
"Dreams are good things, even if they can be frightening. The
dead don't dream." So says Luis Buñuel, through his alter
ego Fernando Rey, in his most personal and haunting film, one that
perhaps reveals more about one of cinema's most elusive talents than
any other.
Tristana, an
inspired adaptation of a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós,
allows Buñuel ample opportunity to indulge in his favourite
pastimes, exploring the darker avenues of human sexuality whilst poking
fun at the clergy and the bourgeoisie, but it is also an unflattering
self-portrait which reflects the director's own anxieties over growing
old and losing his grip on the thing he valued most, his artistic and
intellectual freedom (understandably, as Buñuel was 69 when he
made the film). There can be no doubt that the central male
character Don Lope, magnificently portrayed by Fernando Rey, is
meant to be Buñuel himself, and this is what gives
Tristana a bitter sense of
poignancy, particularly as Don Lope turns out to be everything that
Buñuel despised.
It is no accident that the film is set entirely in Toledo, as the
ancient Spanish city held a special importance for Buñuel, being
the place he would often visit in the company of fellow avant-garde
artists (including Salvador Dalí) in his student days.
Visually, Toledo is the perfect setting for
Tristana, its maze of narrow
criss-crossing streets, continually ascending and descending as in an
Escher print, contributing much to the film's stark Freudian
imagery. This was the last of three films that Buñuel made
in Spain - the others being
Las
Hurdes (1933) and
Viridiana (1961) - and so it is
fitting that it should have been shot in the locale that held so much
importance for him.
The basic plot of
Tristina is
one that can be found in many of Buñuel's films. A
respectable pillar of the community (Fernando Rey) succumbs to the
allure of a totally unsuitable woman (Catherine Deneuve), who uses the
power he gives her to humiliate and ultimately destroy him.
Buñuel told virtually an identical story in
Viridiana (1961) and would offer
another variation of it in his last film,
Cet obscur objet du désir
(1977). What sets
Tristana
apart from these other films is the fact that the main male character
is far more easily recognisable as Buñuel himself. Like
Buñuel, Don Lope is a free-thinking intellectual who scorns
petit bourgeois conventions and the hypocrisies of the Church, and who
is evidently over-preoccupied with his age. Towards the end of
the film, Don Lope becomes everything that Buñuel dreaded
becoming himself - he totally surrenders his anti-bourgeois socialist
principles and ends up drinking chocolate with the clergy. The
recurring dream image of Don Lope's severed head serving as a bell
clapper (the film's most striking surreal touch) is one that haunted
Buñuel, a man renowned for his attacks on the Catholic church.
Like the main female characters in so many of Buñuel's films,
Tristana begins as an innocent but soon becomes aware of the power she
has over the male sex, and uses it ruthlessly to gain her own
freedom. It is tempting to think that these uninhibited,
empowered females represent some kind of ideal to which Buñuel
himself aspired - beholden to nobody, completely free yet capable of
exerting a tremendous influence over everyone they encountered.
Catherine Deneuve had previously played another untamable
dominatrix-type in Buñuel's previous
Belle de jour (1967), and she
is just as well-suited for the part of Tristana, an equally mysterious
yet alluring femme fatale. In the most potent and poetic sequence
in the film (a slightly sick parody of the balcony scene from
Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet)
Tristana asserts her sexual freedom and power over the male sex by
exposing her breasts (just out of camera shot) to a mute
adolescent. Tristana's face becomes a mask of triumphant
exultation as she savours the power that nature has given her, whilst
the adolescent, visibly aroused and troubled by what he has seen, turns
and flees like a frightened cat.
Tristana's portrayal of male
desire is more subtly rendered and far more complex than in many of
Buñuel's films, and it could be argued that this is the
director's most romantic film. Don Lope's initial attraction to
the virginal Tristana is evidently no more than the lust of a dirty old
man for a young innocent placed in his care. By this stage,
Tristana knows no better and allows herself to be seduced by her new
guardian. The deflowering has two consequences: first, it makes
Tristana aware of the power she has over men, liberating her both
morally and emotionally; second, it awakens in Don Lope deeper feelings
of emotional attachment. As Don Lope falls in love with her,
Tristana rejects him in favour of the first attractive young man she
comes across, an egoistical artist who proves to be as unsuitable for
her as she is for Don Lope.
When Tristana falls ill with a potentially life-threatening tumour, it
is to Don Lope she returns, and we cannot be sure what her motives are
for doing so: is it guilt, a realisation that he is the one who loves
her most and is best placed to care for her, or just another act of
wilful perversity? Tristana's illness naturally intensifies
Don Lope's love for her and they marry, although it proves to be a sham
marriage. By this stage, her leg amputated, Tristana has nothing
but contempt for her benefactor and even acts to hasten his demise so
that she can steal his fortune. No male character is more
ill-treated than Don Lope in Buñuel's entire oeuvre, and yet it
is
Tristana, the indomitable,
irresistible female, we are compelled to identify with. Unlike
Don Lope, Buñuel would remain the mischievous bourgeois
anarchist right up to the end, and in his next two films,
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
(1972) and
Le Fantôme de la liberté
(1974), he would lay into the cosy conventions of the middle-classes
with as much ferocity as a wolf raiding a well-stocked chicken coop.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Luis Buñuel film:
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)