TRISTANA Movie Review
When adapting the 80-page novel by Benito Pérez Galdós upon which Tristana is based, Luis Buñuel remarked that “it allows me to observe some aspects of Spanish life and customs in which I am interested.” After seeing Tristana, the director's wryly innocuous description may make you burst out laughing. Set in Toledo, Spain, in the late 1920s, during a period of military dictatorship, the film tells the story of Don Lope (Fernando Rey), a vain, aging aristocrat who becomes erotically obsessed with and eventually seduces his young ward, Tristana (Catherine Deneuve). Though Tristana tries to escape Don Lope's insulated and stifling manipulation, she's forced to return when illness forces the amputation of her leg. This might be where any other storyteller would wrap up a moral tale about the consequences of sexual betrayal, but Buñuel simply uses it as a starting point for his savagely witty, utterly clear-eyed portrait of the powerful—and universal—bonds between religion, sexuality, and guilt. Tristana is one of those movies that leaves you feeling as if you'd never seen a movie before; the surrealist director's storytelling looks so unforced that the film is almost over before you realize how subversive and even radical it is. The humor in this and other Buñuel masterpieces, such as The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, begins with the sheerly situational; yet what may at first seem only a bizarre cinematic moment (Don Lope caressing Tristana while trying to comfort her with the sentiment that many men would find her even more exciting since her amputation) attains its full comic stature only when we realize that the forbidden honesty underlying the scene is so liberating as to inspire relieved laughter. Brilliantly performed by Rey and Deneuve, Tristana is one of the greatest achievements by the cinema's most astute chronicler of desire.
NEXT STOP … Viridiana, Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire
1970 (PG) 98m/C SP IT FR Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos, Antonio Casas, Jesus Fernandez, Vincent Solder; D: Luis Bunuel; W: Julio Alejandro, Luis Bunuel; C: Jose F. Aguayo. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘70: Best Foreign-Language Film. VHS HTV