Viridiana
Luis Buñuel (1961)
Buñuel’s anti-religious, anti-materialistic fable, set in Franco’s Spain, is deeply misanthropic and highly entertaining. Except for one protracted sequence (which features Viridiana’s best-known image), the storytelling is briskly concise. The title character is a young nun who, at the start of the film, is about to take her final vows. Mother Superior (Rosita Yarza) instructs Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) first to visit the country estate of her uncle and sole living relative, Don Jaime, who has paid for her religious education and training. Reclusive Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) lives in a decaying mansion with just his housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano) and her young daughter Rita (Teresita Rabal) for company. On the eve of Viridiana’s return to the convent, Don Jaime tells her his wife died in their bed on the couple’s wedding night. He prevails upon Viridiana to wear his late wife’s wedding dress, which he has kept and fetishised throughout his years of widowhood. He then begs his niece to marry him. When she refuses, Don Jaime drugs Viridiana and carries her to bed. On the point of raping her, he thinks better of it but next morning tells Viridiana otherwise. Horrified, she hurriedly prepares to leave the house; it makes no difference when Don Jaime, distraught at her reaction, then says he didn’t go through with the rape. At a bus station, Viridiana is confronted by uniformed police who inform her she must return with them to the mansion. Don Jaime, in shame, has hanged himself.
The terms of his will divide Don Jaime’s estate equally between Viridiana and an illegitimate son called Jorge. Although Mother Superior comes to the house to plead with her to return to holy orders, Viridiana insists she no longer can. She will instead devote her life to God by helping those in need. She rounds up a collection of local down-and-outs, giving them food and shelter in outbuildings, to the disgust of the estate caretaker (Francisco René), who quits his job. Jorge (Francisco Rabal), a city dweller until now, takes vigorous first steps to renovate the house and develop the long-neglected land on which it stands. When he arrives to claim his inheritance, he’s accompanied by Lucía (Victoria Zinny), with whom he shares a bedroom and whom Viridiana wrongly assumes to be his wife, but Lucía doesn’t stick around long. As well as missing the city, she suspects that Jorge has his eye on his lovely quasi-cousin – although he’s more obviously interested in Ramona, who returns the interest. While Viridiana, Jorge, Ramona and Rita are absent at a meeting with lawyers, the vagrants break into the mansion. They take their places at the dining table, eat, drink and are merry; two of them have sex on the floor; others come to blows; much of the décor is trashed. The beggars’ banquet culminates in the notorious image that parodies Leonardo’s The Last Supper. There’s further mayhem when the owners return. Order is restored once Ramona calls the police and they arrive but Viridiana is dismayed that her piety has yielded such dire results. A few nights later, Jorge and Ramona are in his bedroom, playing cards and listening to pop music, when there’s a knock on the door. It’s Viridiana. Jorge invites her to join him and Ramona in the card game. She abjectly takes a seat beside them. Jorge, as he prepares to deal cards, remarks to Viridiana, ‘You know, the first time I saw you, I thought, “My cousin and I will end up shuffling the deck together”.’
BFI is screening Viridiana in their ‘From Censored to Restored’ season and that final sequence is a pleasing example of the comedy of censorship, which must have greatly amused its writer-director (Buñuel shares the screenplay credit with Julio Alejandro). The Spanish censors of the early 1960s rejected the film’s original ending, which showed ‘Viridiana entering Jorge’s room and slowly closing the door behind her’ (Wikipedia). The ‘acceptable’ ending, through the sexual innuendo of Jorge’s closing line and the implication of a ménage à trois, is more strongly suggestive than the sequence it replaced. That said, ‘acceptable’ is, in this case, a very relative term. Although Viridiana shared the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1961, it wasn’t released in Spain until 1977 (after Franco’s death) and the Vatican publicly condemned the film. The opening titles are accompanied by the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah and appear against an exterior shot of the convent, inside which the camera then moves for the first conversation between Mother Superior and Viridiana. Buñuel reprises the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ for the climax to the beggars’ evening of anarchic revelry.
Buñuel ridicules Viridiana’s Christianity chiefly by demonstrating that good works are wasted on fundamentally venal and vicious fellow humans. The vagrants are far from a band of brothers and sisters, and the elderly leper José (Juan García Tiendra) is worst off in their pecking order. When the owners return to the mansion, however, José helps El Cojo (José Manuel Martín), a lame man who also paints and to whom Viridiana has seemed to take a particular liking, to knock Jorge out and tie him up. El Cojo then prepares to rape Viridiana at knifepoint. Once Jorge comes to, he urges José to kill his companion in exchange for cash; the leper considers his options, picks up a shovel and batters El Cojo to death. The have-nots are an amazing collection of grotesque faces, shapes and sizes. In his late-life autobiography, My Last Breath, Buñuel writes that he had known some of these individuals since the 1930s and recalls that Juan García Tiendra really was ‘half beggar, half madman, and was allowed to live in the studio courtyard during the shooting. The man paid no attention whatsoever to my directions, yet he’s marvellous in the movie’.
From the opening scene in the convent, Viridiana is strikingly clear-minded but the folly of her world view is soon implied during her initial stay with Don Jaime. Sleepwalking in her nightdress, she enters the room where her uncle sits. Unaware that she’s exposing plenty of bare leg and inflaming his desire, she bends over the fireplace, emptying balls of wool and so on from a work basket, replacing them with handfuls of ashes from the hearth. In her waking life, though, Viridiana is resiliently determined to organise: Silvia Pinal’s vivacious practicality makes her eventual defeat and submission startling. The two main men in the story are played and contrasted very effectively. Fernando Rey’s Don Jaime is guiltily mired in his personal past and in cultural tradition. Francisco Rabal’s Jorge isn’t entirely carefree (see below) but, in his relationships with women at least, is freewheeling. He combines likeable earthiness and disquieting chauvinism. Rabal (whose young daughter plays Ramona’s child) has a great bit when Jorge comes into Viridiana’s bedroom without asking, sits on the bed and tells her that he and Lucía aren’t married. When he gets up to leave, Viridiana asks him to knock before entering in future. Jorge replies by running his eyes over her; as a parting shot, he blows a puff of cigarette smoke in her direction and, with a slight hiss, gives a mocking smile.
This isn’t among his most conspicuously surreal works but Buñuel is nonetheless cavalier about plotting, never letting realism stand in his way if it doesn’t suit. Since Jorge is irked by Viridiana’s charity-begins-at-home project and takes a dim view of the unfortunates whose souls she means to save, it’s wholly implausible that he leaves the place unsupervised for the beggars to invade. It seems unlikely that one of their number, Enedina (Lola Gaos), would get the others to pose for the Last Supper shot. Without the invasion, though, there’d be no bacchanal; without Enedina’s camera to capture the moment, the freeze frame wouldn’t be the same. It’s hard to argue that the film would be better off without them. Buñuel’s view of human nature is wholly cynical yet his visual and comic flair makes Viridiana a bracing experience. There’s excitement in watching a filmmaker express such a cogent vision of life, never mind that the vision is desolating.
That said, one of my favourite moments in the film was an uncharacteristically hopeful one – though I realise I may be clutching at straws and that Buñuel may not have intended it this way. Viridiana includes a fine image of predatory efficiency when a rat is shown on a pile of sacks in an attic and a cat leaps into the frame, pouncing on the rat. A more extended animal sequence occurs when Jorge, with his foreman (Alfonso Cordón), is standing roadside on the edge of the estate and sees a peasant (Manuel Alexandre) in a cart, pulled by a mule; Jorge notices a dog, attached by string to the axle of the cart, and struggling to keep up with it. The peasant drops off two uniformed policemen (these emblems of Franco’s police state reappear several times in the narrative – always briefly, always to sinister effect). Jorge then reprimands the peasant for his treatment of the dog and offers to buy it from him. In the conversation that follows, it becomes clear that the peasant isn’t as thoroughly callous about the animal as Jorge first thought, although the townie can’t fathom the countryman’s blend of cruelty and concern. Jorge buys the dog and is warmly thanked by the peasant, who advises him that the less the dog eats, the better he runs. As the peasant is about to drive away, Jorge asks the dog’s name, the man replies ‘Canelo’ and the dog (in an excellent cameo) immediately pulls to go back to his master – Jorge needs to keep a tight hold of the string leash. As the cart recedes into the distance, another one approaches on the opposite side of the road. Neither Jorge nor his foreman notices a wretched dog tied to the second cart’s axle. This splendid visual joke is a blackly incisive summary of the film’s larger preoccupation with the futility of trying to sort out the world’s suffering. I still felt that the first dog got a reasonably good deal out of Jorge’s transaction with the peasant. Needless to say, however, that’s the last time we see Canelo.
19 July 2025