Tristane (1970)

Directed by: Luis Buñuel | 95 minutes | drama | Actors: Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos, Antonio Casas, Jesús Fernández, Vicente Soler, José Calvo, Fernando Cebrián, Antonio Ferrandis, José María Caffarel, Cándida Losada, Joaquín Pamplona, ​​Mary Paz Pondal, Juanjo Menéndez, José Blanch, Sergio Mendizábal, Luis Aller, Luis Rico, Saturno Cerra, Jesús Combarro, Leonardo Scavino, Vicente Roca, Ximénez Carillo, Adriano Domínguez, José Riesgo, Rosa Luisa Goróstegui, Antonio Cintado, Pilar Vela, Lorenzo Rodríguez, Aldo Sambrell

Sacrilege, disruptor, surrealist provocateur and ruthless satirist. These are just a few of the many stamps that the anarchist filmmaker Luis Buñuel was given in the Spain of dictator Franco. But don’t think it kept him awake for even a second. For Buñuel, it was precisely these nicknames that he wore with great pride. Even though he had to ‘flee’ to continue practicing his trade to Mexico, and later France. His film ‘Viridiana’ (1961) unleashed one of the biggest film scandals under the rule of the infamous Franco and was described as pure blasphemy at the time. Buñuel enjoyed it. After all, his mission was to look at the chair legs of the established order, until the heavyweights who sat on that chair (church, state and bourgeoisie) slumped. “I am against conventional morality, against traditional chimeras, against sentimentality and all the moralistic filthiness that has been conveyed into our society by sentimentality.”

Nine years after ‘Viridiana’, Buñuel came up with a similar film. In ‘Tristana’ (1970), set in 1930s Toledo, Catherine Deneuve plays the title role, a young woman recently orphaned and now taken over by her patron, the liberal and erudite but anarchist Don Lope (Fernando Rey ) is taken into the house. Though he is old enough to be her grandfather, Don Lope sets his sights on Tristana, whom he calls “a flower of pure innocence.” He and only he will be the one to take her innocence. Tristana, obviously unhappy in this situation, becomes more and more rebellious towards Don Lope and eventually flees into the arms of the handsome young artist Horacio (Franco Nero). But when she becomes seriously ill, she is forced to return to Don Lope because only he has the money and the means to take care of her. It also offers her an excellent opportunity to take revenge on the man who has hurt her so much.

Buñuel based the story of ‘Tristana’ on an obscure novel by one of Spain’s literary greats of the early twentieth century, Benito Perez Galdos. Of course he threw a typical Buñuel sauce over it. The events were moved from the 1920s to the 1930s and the story was immersed in the director’s signature themes. And so in ‘Tristana’ the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church are also beaten up and obsessive (male) desire plays an important role. In fact, all of Buñuel’s films are personal documents and in ‘Tristana’ you also get the idea of ​​getting a glimpse into the complex personality of the director himself. His wishes, desires and ideals are bundled in the character Don Lope (just as Fernando Rey also portrays a figure in ‘Viridiana’ that is a split from Buñuel himself). The director shows that he has sufficient self-reflective capacity to condemn his own ideas in a certain sense. Buñuel also made it even more personal by incorporating images from his own nightmares (the severed head dangling like a clapper in a church bell) into the film.

Because the viewer should be distracted as little as possible from what ‘Tristana’ is actually about, the film has been set up soberly. That means that you will find many shades of gray and brown in this color film. The acting is of an excellent level, with Fernando Rey as the main asset. Despite his bad sides, you can’t hate Don Lope. He is a sad figure who, in fact, mainly arouses a feeling of pity. The same ambiguity can be found in Tristana, beautifully portrayed by Catherine Deneuve. In the beginning, she is the naive object of desire for Don Lope. Slowly, however, she loses her innocence and increasingly goes her own way, to the point where she separates herself from him. But is she using that newly acquired position correctly? Isn’t she playing the same game with the maid’s deaf-mute son as Don Lope did with her? In the end, only Horacio seems to be whoever he is to the outside world.

In Spain, ‘Tristana’ was voted the ninth best Spanish film of the twentieth century by film critics and professionals in 1996. Whether the film deserves that rating is a question that everyone has to answer for themselves. In any case, it is not Buñuel’s best film. Although well developed, the story drags along too slowly, especially in the middle part of the film. The excellent acting and the double dimension due to the personal nature of this print do not detract from this. But a ‘mediocre’ Buñuel – does that actually exist? – is still extremely worthwhile for fans of the classic psychological drama.