viridiana (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 6/6

Viridiana was the final film in a week of Buñuel. It marked his return to Spain as a filmmaker after years of exile in Mexico, and at the same time, it marks the start of his third incarnation as a director, the era that would produce a handful of copper bottomed classics.

It’s a remarkable film, full of complexity and what is known in Spanish as highly atrevido, a word that means bold or daring, but also implies a naughtiness, or a cheek. It has a narrative which is unafraid to twist and turn like a cobra, heading one way at one point, then changing gears. The film’s delirious closing sequence only features the protagonist, Viridiana herself, at the very end. The coda ending is like a throwaway sidewinder, which at once heralds the future of Spain and casts its past in the bin.

The story opens with the titular heroine Viridiana committed to a nunnery, seeking a life in Christ. Forced by her mother superior to visit her older but virile uncle, played by Fernando Rey, she finds herself drugged and abused by him. When it looks as though she has successfully escaped, she is brought back by a brutal strategic move on the uncle’s part, one which will wed her to life beyond the nunnery, whether she likes it or not. The film then switches tack, as Viridiana becomes a kind of Mother Theresa, welcoming the down and outs and outcasts of the local town to come and live with her on the estate. All this is then turned on its head again as her cousin, played by Francisco Rabal, comes to take over and modernise the estate.

In the course of all this, every single Buñuel trope is thrown into the mix. Perverse sexuality, the hypocrisy of religion, the marginals of society, and the overturning of the social order, depicted in a riotous scene which is like something out of Twelfth Night. Ancient European customs and class divides are represented and challenged. It’s a glorious jamboree of a movie which manages to conclude with the modern world subtly infiltrating and taking over the old world, as electricity and music flood the house and seduce, perhaps, a newly glamorous if tarnished Viridiana, her blond hair released like a dose of pure hedonism, the coming hedonism of the sixties.