Tristana (1970)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

Film Review

"Dreams are good things, even if they can be frightening.  The dead don't dream."  So says Luis Buñuel, through his alter ego Fernando Rey, in his most personal and haunting film, one that perhaps reveals more about one of cinema's most elusive talents than any other.  Tristana, an inspired adaptation of a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, allows Buñuel ample opportunity to indulge in his favourite pastimes, exploring the darker avenues of human sexuality whilst poking fun at the clergy and the bourgeoisie, but it is also an unflattering self-portrait which reflects the director's own anxieties over growing old and losing his grip on the thing he valued most, his artistic and intellectual freedom (understandably, as Buñuel was 69 when he made the film).  There can be no doubt that the central male character Don Lope, magnificently  portrayed by Fernando Rey, is meant to be Buñuel himself, and this is what gives Tristana a bitter sense of poignancy, particularly as Don Lope turns out to be everything that Buñuel despised.

It is no accident that the film is set entirely in Toledo, as the ancient Spanish city held a special importance for Buñuel, being the place he would often visit in the company of fellow avant-garde artists (including Salvador Dalí) in his student days.  Visually, Toledo is the perfect setting for Tristana, its maze of narrow criss-crossing streets, continually ascending and descending as in an Escher print, contributing much to the film's stark Freudian imagery.  This was the last of three films that Buñuel made in Spain - the others being Las Hurdes (1933) and Viridiana (1961) - and so it is fitting that it should have been shot in the locale that held so much importance for him.

The basic plot of Tristina is one that can be found in many of Buñuel's films.  A respectable pillar of the community (Fernando Rey) succumbs to the allure of a totally unsuitable woman (Catherine Deneuve), who uses the power he gives her to humiliate and ultimately destroy him.  Buñuel told virtually an identical story in Viridiana (1961) and would offer another variation of it in his last film, Cet obscur objet du désir (1977).  What sets Tristana apart from these other films is the fact that the main male character is far more easily recognisable as Buñuel himself.  Like Buñuel, Don Lope is a free-thinking intellectual who scorns petit bourgeois conventions and the hypocrisies of the Church, and who is evidently over-preoccupied with his age.  Towards the end of the film, Don Lope becomes everything that Buñuel dreaded becoming himself - he totally surrenders his anti-bourgeois socialist principles and ends up drinking chocolate with the clergy.  The recurring dream image of Don Lope's severed head serving as a bell clapper (the film's most striking surreal touch) is one that haunted Buñuel, a man renowned for his attacks on the Catholic church.

Like the main female characters in so many of Buñuel's films, Tristana begins as an innocent but soon becomes aware of the power she has over the male sex, and uses it ruthlessly to gain her own freedom.  It is tempting to think that these uninhibited, empowered females represent some kind of ideal to which Buñuel himself aspired - beholden to nobody, completely free yet capable of exerting a tremendous influence over everyone they encountered.  Catherine Deneuve had previously played another untamable dominatrix-type in Buñuel's previous Belle de jour (1967), and she is just as well-suited for the part of Tristana, an equally mysterious yet alluring femme fatale.  In the most potent and poetic sequence in the film (a slightly sick parody of the balcony scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) Tristana asserts her sexual freedom and power over the male sex by exposing her breasts (just out of camera shot) to a mute adolescent.  Tristana's face becomes a mask of triumphant exultation as she savours the power that nature has given her, whilst the adolescent, visibly aroused and troubled by what he has seen, turns and flees like a frightened cat.

Tristana's portrayal of male desire is more subtly rendered and far more complex than in many of Buñuel's films, and it could be argued that this is the director's most romantic film.  Don Lope's initial attraction to the virginal Tristana is evidently no more than the lust of a dirty old man for a young innocent placed in his care.  By this stage, Tristana knows no better and allows herself to be seduced by her new guardian.  The deflowering has two consequences: first, it makes Tristana aware of the power she has over men, liberating her both morally and emotionally; second, it awakens in Don Lope deeper feelings of emotional attachment.  As Don Lope falls in love with her, Tristana rejects him in favour of the first attractive young man she comes across, an egoistical artist who proves to be as unsuitable for her as she is for Don Lope.

When Tristana falls ill with a potentially life-threatening tumour, it is to Don Lope she returns, and we cannot be sure what her motives are for doing so: is it guilt, a realisation that he is the one who loves her most and is best placed to care for her, or just another act of wilful perversity?   Tristana's illness naturally intensifies Don Lope's love for her and they marry, although it proves to be a sham marriage.  By this stage, her leg amputated, Tristana has nothing but contempt for her benefactor and even acts to hasten his demise so that she can steal his fortune.  No male character is more ill-treated than Don Lope in Buñuel's entire oeuvre, and yet it is Tristana, the indomitable, irresistible female, we are compelled to identify with.  Unlike Don Lope, Buñuel would remain the mischievous bourgeois anarchist right up to the end, and in his next two films, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974), he would lay into the cosy conventions of the middle-classes with as much ferocity as a wolf raiding a well-stocked chicken coop.

Film Synopsis

Spain, in the 1920s.  After the death of her mother, a beautiful young woman, Tristana, becomes the ward of a respectable but impecunious aristocrat, Don Lope.  The latter refuses to work for a living, deeming this to be beneath his dignity, and spends most of his time voicing his socialist and anti-religious opinions, often with a large dose of hypocrisy.  He secretly takes advantage of his ward whilst publicly making great virtue of his self-restraint.  A rift quickly develops between Tristana and Don Lope when the young woman meets and falls in love with an artist, Horacio.  Tristana is driven by Lope's jealousy to elope with the artist, but returns a few years later, grievously ill, begging to stay in Lope's house...