Viridiana

I happened to catch Viridiana on TV last night, the great Spanish film of 1960’s, which is considered to be one of the crowning achievements of Luis Bunuel’s career. There was enough in the film, which could sustain my misanthropy for a long time so I thought let’s write something about it.

This drama about the shocking initiation of a young, beautiful, innocent and piously religious girl in the realities of passion and the grossness and meanness of humankind might be too bitter for some tastes, but for me it had just the right tang to enliven my palette. The stinging, unmerciful sarcasm directed at the piously insulated mind and all things religious definitely set my blood roaring to all the nerve cells.

The film’s plot is simple. It starts with the young girl, who wants to become a nun and do some good in the world, visiting her uncle’s house for the last time apparently because he has helped her financially all along. But the old man has secret desires to initiate her into womanhood because she resembles his dead wife, whose wedding dress he coerces her to wear in one of the film’s countless grotesque scenes, bordering on necrophilia. But in an ironic twist of fate, after a failed attempt at having a way with the girl after drugging her, the uncle commits suicide and the girl inherits all the property along with uncle’s illegitimate son who is in contrast to her a realist in the matters of human drives and passions. In an attempt to atone for what she thinks her sin, she brings home derelicts, cripples and beggars and gives them shelter and food. But soon with brutal eloquence and razor-sharp irony, which perhaps only Bunuel could have managed, all those bums start showing their true faces—that of brutal thugs, informing sneaks, loathsome lepers and frothing rapists—all portrayed in brutally realistic detail. In fact some scenes are so grotesque that they look like surrealistic. In one of the scenes a young girl is shown playing with the ropes with which the old uncle hanged himself and her mother when she sees this gently reprimands her and asks her to show some respect to the dead! (Bunuel was, by the way, one of pioneers of the surrealist movement in art.)

In the devastating final scene all those thugs in their wild bacchanalian orgy after they have looted and destroyed everything even pose as if for a photograph, which I later came to know was a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper which has some holy significance for Christians. As if all this was not enough our poor heroine is sexually assaulted by one of the thugs while another waits for his turn. Only then does she get disillusioned and comes back to the material world shown by the scene where she throws away her scarf and joins in game of card with her cousin and his lover, listening to the rock and roll music, perhaps even indicating some possibility of a ménage a trios amongst all three.

The film is outrageous and extremely offensive but the great thing is that it outrages all the right sentiments and offends all the right people. Luis Bunuel was famous for his rabid and militant anti-catholicism. He once said—“I hope I don't go to hell, imagine the table talk of all those popes and cardinals". The film takes a Nietzschean delight in mocking the idea of Christian charity. Bunuel seems to suggest that this is what happens to saints. Their virtues are thrown back in their faces. People, and the world, cannot be changed and acceptance of things as they are is the only recourse left. This of course taken literally, is an extreme cynical view. But as a rhetorical argument it works very well. If we accept charity and goodwill in the name of something as stupid and false as religion, it is bound to get misguided. May be some parallel can be drawn with what the roman church is doing with the AIDS related aid in Africa these days.

"I should like", Bunuel once famously said, "to make even the most ordinary spectator feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds". Perhaps this is what makes Viridiana, one of the great feelbad movies of all time, and for only that will get five stars from me.