2012 Film Challenge #10: Luis Buñuel Triple Feature

Way back in 1993 and 1994 I was living on the Upper East Side of NYC, supposedly trying to make a living as a writer. I was very interested in film at the time, and so once or twice a week I would go downtown to Theater St. Mark's, a.k.a. Theater 80, a revival house which held daily double features of the greats of world cinema; for four or five dollars you could see Fellini, Polanski, Bergman, Welles, Godard, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Kurosawa—you name it. Sometimes to ease my conscience about the expense I would forgo the subway and walk the seventy blocks from East 78th Street to St. Mark's Place and back. Such are the days of a young man. 

One afternoon I was at the theater to see something or other, and when the lights went down and the titles came up I realized with shock and bemusement that I had gotten the schedule wrong, and instead of whatever movie I had intended to see I was in attendance at something called, ominously, The Exterminating Angel. Huh? Well, no matter—a movie is a movie. I smiled at the unexpected turn of events, chomped another Raisinet, and let myself sink deeper into the red velvet chair.

Very quickly I got a good read on what the film was about. It was from the mid-nineteen-sixties, and it concerned a posh dinner party among the very upper crust of nobility. Well, I knew the drill—I had already seen The Rules of the Game, and I could tell that this one would be a similarly wry social study about the gulf between the classes and the final seismic aftershocks of the clash between monarchies and Marx. The rich would have their noses gently twigged, but of course we would see that they have their own humanity too, in a way.

And yet...it was strange. The characters were real, they moved and smiled as people do, but I found myself repeatedly blinking, shaking my head, thinking, wait, did I just see that? Was I daydreaming, drifting off and missing something? Was I imagining things, or...did that woman have chicken feet sticking out of her purse? Didn't they just...? And...?

Regardless, the movie went on, and I followed along with it. It was amusing, and I liked it.

Then, slowly but surely, I began to realize that, no, something was wrong here. Something was very wrong. This was not what I had expected. This was not Rules of the Game. This was not anything. A dark chill ran down my spine and flooded my feet and fingertips as a slow realization of what was happening on the screen came over me. It was like one of those dreams—one of those dreams where you are walking through a zoo, through the aviaries and snake houses and haystrewn stalls, where the captive animals look at you blankly, balefully, and then your hands brush the bamboo, you walk in the beaten dirt and the trees, and see the far-off wall with the people lined up staring, on...on the other side, and with a sudden, horrible sinking dread you realize you took a wrong turn, you walked through the wrong door and you're in the pen with the animals, and now the tigers that surround you are slowly rising to their feet....

It ended up being one of the most powerful experiences I had ever had at the movies, and as I staggered out of the Theater St. Mark's into the New York City sunlight, I could only ask, who the hell made that? 

Luis Buñuel was a Spaniard by birth, born in 1900 and fellow student in Madrid with and friend to Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. He was a part of the Surrealist movement, and made history in 1929 with the infamous short film co-written with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou. The following year he made a full-length, riot-inciting Surrealist film entitled L'Age d'Or, but subsequently found it difficult to get funding for his projects. He held different odd jobs in the film industry in both Paris and the U.S.A.—having left Spain out of dislike for Franco—before finally settling in Mexico in 1945. There he directed many forgettable commercial films during the late 1940s and the 1950s, but on occasion he also made more daring ones, such as El, Ensayo de un Crimen, and, most notably, his portrait of Mexican slum kids, Los Olvidados, which won him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.


Slowly Buñuel's reputation began to grow, and the late 1950s and the 1960s were a golden period for him, where he created such such films as Nazarín, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Chambermaid, Simon of the Desert, and Belle de Jour. By the late 1960s he was working in Europe exclusively, and in 1972 his Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. His final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, was made in 1977. He died in Mexico City in 1983.


I became a devotee of Buñuel then, and over the years I would scour the video store shelves for any sign of his name. Slowly, gradually, my collection grew, and with it my appreciation of the man and his work. He spoke to me; there was something about his sensibility that hit me right between the eyes. My very first date with the woman who would become my wife was to see the Scorsese-produced reissue of Belle de Jour. 


The three movies I've picked as my "favorites" are Viridiana (1961), the aforementioned Exterminating Angel (1962), and Simon of the Desert (1965). All three feature the beautiful and talented Mexican actress Silvia Pinal. 

Viridiana

Viridiana centers on a young Spanish woman who is about to take the vows to become a Catholic nun when she receives a letter from her wealthy, estranged uncle. She goes to visit him at his request, and the events that transpire are...unexpected. The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961, and then the following day was denounced in an editorial in the Vatican City newspaper as being blasphemous. It was subsequently banned in several countries and the Spanish Undersecretary of Cinema was sacked. 

The Exterminating Angel

The Exterminating Angel is about a high society dinner party in Mexico, or should I say that it starts there and moves on to something completely different. It is the perfect marriage between the mature director's storytelling skill and the surrealism of his youth, though that's not to suggest that the film is nonsensical; on the contrary, it has its own strict inner logic, fantastical but also somehow familiar and compelling, like the clockwork of a dream.

Simon of the Desert

Last and most favorite is Simon of the Desert, a film about a fictional Middle Ages ascetic loosely based on Saint Simeon Stylites. Simon spends his days praying to God atop a high pillar in the desert; he interacts with priests and worshipers and is tormented by the Devil, as played by Silvia Pinal. He rejects the world around him and reminds himself of the danger of its temptations by wearing rags and subsisting on only oil, lettuce and water. The devil tricks, taunts and stabs him, but he stands fast. 


Like Viridiana, Simon of the Desert is another complex, half-sarcastic, half-serious film about faith, but it takes the theme one step farther into a new realm. Simon is truly faithful, even Christlike, and yet Buñuel makes us look hard at the paradoxes of that faith. Where is the line between belief and insanity? If a saint removes himself from humanity, what use is he? For all its irony and strangeness, though, Simon of the Desert is perhaps the most powerfully religious film I have ever seen; Simon truly is devoted to God, and the portrait of his battered, struggling saintliness is genuinely moving. At times he even seems to be a creature of pure good; he shares his meager provisions with a passing rabbit, not because thinks he must, not because of a moral imperative to share, but simply out of joy at God's creation. 


Funding ran out halfway through production, and so the film is only forty-five minutes long. Buñuel was forced to create an abrupt ending to the story, one which might seem at first glance to be a cheap gag or the end to a shaggy-dog story, but to me it is one of those serendipitous accidents where necessity forces a change that improves on the original intent. The ending is a vision of hell that is incongruous and absurd but also sneakily, subtly horrifying, right up until the final, excoriating scream.

How did they hold up? What can I say? I'm a fan. If there were Luis Buñuel T-shirts, I would buy one. If they sold a "my chien Andalou is smarter than your honor student" bumper sticker, I would put it on my car. To be honest, though, when I call Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel favorites, what I mean is that those are the ones that I think are simply his best, most "Buñuellian" films; they are the ones which, in my mind, get straight to the heart of what the man is all about in the most attractive and well-made packages. In short, they are the ones that I recommend. If we're talking about the one that means the most to me personally, it would probably be Simon of the Desert.