DVR Diary: VIRIDIANA (1961)

 

Once upon a time, a novice nun was sent to visit her closest-living relative before she took her vows. The relative proved a dissolute, unhappy person; memories of a lost loved one resulted in suicide. Where have we heard this one before? If I had done my cinematic duty earlier and watched Luis Bunuel's film sooner, I'd have asked that question when I saw Ida on the big screen last fall. I'm happy to see, after a Google search, that I'm not the only person to notice the resemblances between the two movies. Coincidence? Hard to say, since it's hard to see how Ida is a commentary on Viridiana. Admittedly, we can take the parallels further to see how, just as Ida spends a night as a worldly woman in sympathetic emulation of her aunt, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) tries to take on the role of her uncle (Fernando Rey) as a benevolent landowner. Both films arguably are concerned with failed utopias: the drab communism of 1960s Poland in Ida (that film is set approximately at the time of Viridiana's release) and Viridiana's own utopia of charity to the poor. Both novices are repelled or, in Viridiana's case, thwarted by the vulgarity of the world, and while Ida appears to flee back to the convent her Spanish precursor seems to crumple passively in defeat, a kind of prisoner of her own inheritance.

Viridiana was a scandal when it first appeared at Cannes and was banned in Spain for many years afterward. This was the reaction of a conservative (if not fascist) regime to perceived sacrilege, but I wonder whether viewers unfamiliar with the history of Spain or Bunuel's anticlerical views might see Viridiana as a conservative film. The film's second act deals with Viridiana's mission to the local poor, who reward her generosity much as the Three Stooges might. These twelve (or so) stooges are stupid, crass and irrepressible; neither their various afflictions nor their poverty redeem them. Viridiana's error is either to think of them as innocents or to think them capable of spiritual uplift. I admit that I don't know how these bums fit in Bunuel's worldview, but I'm pretty sure the director isn't inviting us to sympathize with them or take pleasure in their violation of the family heirlooms. We've identified too much with poor Viridiana for that. She's been abused by her uncle, who had the hots for her because she resembled his wife who died on their wedding night. There's a certain pathos, or else its opposite, in the trajectory of the wedding dress, which the uncle had treasured and later intended for Viridiana to wear, but ends up draping a drunken bum during Bunuel's slapstick parody of Leonardo's Last Supper. Perhaps Bunuel thinks that the proper final destination for a decadent aristocrat's fetish object. For what it's worth, here's another parallel with Ida: in the later film, Ida tries on her aunt's shoes, teetering on the unfamiliar heels; in Viridiana it's not the title character but her uncle who tries on a woman's shoe, his wife's. Make of that what you will.

The big difference between Viridiana and Ida is that Bunuel is a satirist, while there's little evidence of satire or humor of any sort in the Polish film. Viridiana is a sort of Candide figure, continually clobbered by reality, though not as violently as her Voltairean forebear is, until she's hopefully cured of her idealism. This sort of satire knows neither left nor right; it doesn't satirize one thing to promote another, but sees everything as folly in the face of human nature. Its contempt for idealism guaranteed the antagonism of both the established church and an authoritarian regime, but that doesn't make Bunuel the opposite of either. There is less compassion for Viridiana than the admittedly frosty Ida has for its protagonist. Does this difference make one film better than the other? My snap judgment is that Ida is the more novelistic and humane film, but that's not the only basis for judgment. Will Ida stand the test of fifty years as Viridiana has? Let's compare notes in 2065 -- I'll probably have to trust you to remember what I wrote -- for by then we may have a better idea of what these parables of midcentury disillusion mean in the long term.

DEATH IN THE GARDEN (1956)

Meet Luis Bunuel, action film maker. The way I hear it, the success of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear created a demand in France for hard-boiled adventure films set in Latin America. To satisfy that demand, a French production team went to Mexico to hook up with Don Luis and adapt Jose-Andre Lacour's novel, a gritty tale of greed and unrest in an unnamed banana republic. Bunuel's was but one of several pairs of hands assigned to the adaptation, and it'd be a stretch to call it a personal project of his. But it has some of his characteristic touches and it turns out to be a pretty good adventure film with a very hard-boiled attitude.

The funny thing about it, in retrospect, is that the filmmakers apparently had impeccable leftist credentials, yet La Mort en ce Jardin is a film you could show at a National Rifle Association convention to stormy applause. The setting is a diamond mining camp where the hardworking freelance prospectors, many of whom are French expatriates, are being forced from their claims by the local dictatorship, which has decided to claim all the local resources for itself. What are the expropriated workers going to do about it? They're going to get guns, of course, and as many as they can, even if that means ambushing soldiers and stealing their weapons. After embarrassing themselves initially by being scared off by a warning volley, the miners work themselves up into a small-scale civil war. Maybe it says something about the American left that they don't trust the proletariat with guns. Leftists elsewhere apparently aren't as worried by that prospect, or weren't back in 1956.

Street fighting men in Death in the Garden

Caught in the middle of this conflict are the actual protagonists of the story. Castin (Charles Vanel), an elderly miner with a teenage deaf-mute daughter, claims to be a peaceable man but feels compelled to stand with his fellow miners despite his dream of returning to France to open a restaurant. Chark (pronounced "shark" and played by Georges Marchal) is a drifter who strolls into town during the first confrontation, gives the finger to authority and teases Maria, Castin's daughter, as she tries on a pair of boots in the general store. He has a wallet full of money wrapped around his chest, but stupidly reveals that fact to Djin (Simone Signoret, claiming that the name is an Indian word for a bird), a local prostitute who promptly rats him out to the police, who suspect him of being a bank robber. Castin wants Djin to marry and return to France with him and be a mother to Maria, but Djin wants to know what's in it for her. Father Lizzardi the young local priest (Michel Piccoli) wants the miners (and Castin especially) to stand down for their own good, and is manipulated by Chark into aiding his escape from prison.

Our hero: Chark introduces himself.

As Djin, Simone Signoret perhaps purposefully lacks the glamour of a true femme fatale, but she's the nearest thing this film has to one.

Both Chark and Castin end up accused of being ringleaders of the miners' insurrection, and end up as fugitives on a boat owned by Cenco, a local pimp and informer. The wounded Castin had taken shelter with Djin after a pitched battle, and Lizzardi had sacrificed his reputation to save Castin by allowing townsfolk to believe that he was having a tryst with Djin. The priest ends up on the boat in order to do mission work among the jungle tribes, while Djin comes on board to smuggle Castin without the greedy, reward-hungry Cenco noticing his presence. But eventually Castin and Chark have to boat-jack Cenco and ditch the ship to escape speedboat pursuers. Thus begins a hellish trek through the jungle during which our cast endures lack of food and shelter and Castin slowly goes mad. Chark may be a tough guy (especially when avenging himself on a helpless Djin) and good with a gun, but he's no better at jungle survival than the rest.

Their salvation comes with a grim irony as they end up owing their lives to other people's deaths. They find the wreckage of a passenger plane that crashed in the jungle and had not been found until then. Strewn about are suitcases filled with food -- and high quality food, too, with champagne -- as well as new outfits for Djin and Maria. And not far away is the passage to Brazil and freedom. But this salvation proves short-lived for most of the cast, as at least one of them is too far gone to recover his reason or civilization....

Above, Michel Piccoli finds something terrible to pray over in the plane wreckage. Below, something more terrible preys in the wreckage before the film is over.

The plane wreck may come from the novel, but the idea of these hapless pilgrims saving themselves by becoming parasites and imitating the people whose remains they exploit strikes me as a Bunuel touch. There's something somewhere between surrealism and satire about it that elevates this overall effective adventure to another level. Maybe the general irreverence of the film is also characteristic. When Lizzardi visits Chark in his cell, he tries to give a dying fellow-prisoner the last rites only to be told off by the moribund man. Nevertheless, Lizzardi is a sympathetic character, though consistently shown as well-meaning but either ineffectual or superfluous. In one scene the starving fugitives are trying to cook a snake, but can't find dry leaves or branches because of the last night's rain. Lizzardi tentatively reaches into his duffel bag and prepares to make a great sacrifice. He tears a blank page from his personal Bible as kindling, but finds that the others have managed to start the fire. With visible relief he replaces the page, but then notices that fire ants have swarmed all over the snake meat. Later, he manages to dig up a tuber of some kind and happily shares it with Maria, only to be upstaged by Chark's discovery of the goodies from the plane wreck.

The Bunuel touch?

I wouldn't dare call Death in the Garden a great Bunuel film but it is a solid piece of entertainment, not unlike something you might find in an American paperback original from the same period. It has some nice outdoor cinematography by Jorge Stahl Jr. that reminds one more of The African Queen than The Wages of Fear. In the studio scenes it has the lurid look of many a Forties Technicolor film, and that adds to the pulp feel of the story. Marchal and Signoret are fine as a couple who oscillate from mutual hatred to the sexual attraction of fellow predators, and Piccoli is quite good as the most likely audience-identification character. Bunuel doesn't direct action dynamically, preferring single takes to editing, but he keeps the frame busy with harsh activity in the combat scenes. It may be worth noting that Chark stabs a prison guard in the eye with a fountain pen, but the director of the most famous eye-injury scene in all cinema plays it safe this time, filming the attack from behind the victim's head. Despite that reticence, this really is a kick-ass movie for those with hard-boiled tastes. I haven't seen too many Bunuel's movies, but I imagine it's his most accessible film. As such, it might be a good way to introduce dubious newcomers to one of cinema's great eccentric talents.

SIMON OF THE DESERT (Simon del Desierto, 1964)

As far as I can tell, Luis Bunuel was already making this featurette at the time the project it was meant to be part of was falling apart. It was meant to be one segment in a portmanteau film, with producer Gustavo Alatriste envisioning contributions from other major directors. There was a problem. Federico Fellini was game, but wanted his wife as his leading lady. Ditto for Jules Dassin. Thing was, the producer's wife, Silvia Pinal, rather envisioned the whole project as a vehicle for herself, and expected to star in each episode. So much for the feature film. Simon del Desierto, Bunuel's last Mexican film, perhaps not accidentally featuring Pinal as the devil, ended up a film festival curio and, in the present, a somewhat overpriced DVD from the Criterion Collection. It deserves better.

The film is inspired by the life of St. Simeon Stylites, an early Christian and informal patron saint of flagpole sitters and similar cranks up to David Blaine. To avoid the temptations of the world, Simeon set himself up atop a lone column where he prayed, preached and fasted. In Bunuel's film, Simon (Claudio Brook) has been at it for a while, and has become enough of a celebrity that the town fathers (somewhere in the desert of Syria) have built a new, taller column for him to stand on. In transit from one column to another, he has an awkward encounter with his mother, initially rebuffing her request for a final embrace before relenting under public pressure.

Simon is under plenty of pressure. People ask for his intervention, and with good reason. His prayers restore an ex-thief's severed hands, though the people seem to treat this as business as usual. The local priests are getting annoyed by Simon's "spiritual shenanigans," and some are looking for ways to discredit him. A dwarf shepherd disturbs Simon with the way he fondles a she-goat's teats. Simon sometimes forgets his prayers. And the devil comes to visit a lot, first as an overgrown 19th century schoolgirl who flashes garters and boobs at him, then as a naked scurrying hag, and later as a bearded shepherd(ess?) who Simon is meant to mistake for Jesus Christ. The act fails when an impatient devil punts a lamb out of the picture.

Later still the Antagonist zooms in on an cool coasting coffin before materializing on the column to take Simon on "a long, long journey." Cut to an airplane flying over the desert and a now-empty column, then cut to a modern-day dance club where the young people do the "Radioactive Flesh" while a bored yet better groomed pipe-puffing Simon watches. The devil wants to dance, but Simon tells her, "Have fun, I'm going home." She tells him that "Another tenant's moved in [on the column?]. You'll have to stick it out to the end."

Understandably, Simon is usually interpreted as one of the ambivalent atheist Bunuel's comments on religion. But I wonder. The sudden shift to the present seems like a punchline that all that came before was setting up, so that Bunuel may have meant to say something about the 1960s rather than about Christianity. Simon, after all, is drastically transformed. He is not the half-wild ascetic dropped in the middle of a discotheque to fulminate against flaming youth and their wild parties, but is practically reincarnated as a blase, beatnik-like intellectual type. The point may be that Simon's essential character type may fit more neatly into our modern world than the bulk of the film would lead us to suspect. Ancient Simon and modern Simon have alienation in common. He remains a judgmental onlooker, but now it seems that he lacks the point of reference, the steady base that he had in ancient times, so he's stuck watching the world and the devil dance on or dancing with himself.

Simon is definitely worth seeing, but is it worth owning? Criterion really ought to have a bargain price rate for items like this and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism that fall short of feature length, no matter what extras they include. But I can't get too worried about it because the Albany Public Library came through and picked up this recent release, along with The Exterminating Angel to complement its existing Bunuel holdings. This is the sort of film a public library should own. I deal with the other kind elsewhere.

Here's a Spanish language clip of the hand-healing scene. Nearly the whole film is available as a Google video, but the running time looks about two minutes short of complete, so beware.