four forms of loving
by Douglas Messerli
Luis
Buñuel and Julio Alejandro (screenplay, based, in part, on Benito Pérez Galdós’
novel Halma), Luis Buñuel (director) Viridiana / 1961, USA 1962
The
announcement that after 25 years in exile Luis Buñuel would again make a film
in his Spanish homeland made waves throughout Mexico and Spain, particularly
within Franco’s government which held Buñuel as one of the triumvirate, along
with Pablo Picasso and Pablo Casals, of the distinguished cultural opponents to
Franco’s regime.
If the Spanish government, however, looked forward to the result, what Buñuel offered them in his new film, Viridiana, was like a slap in the face, a work that once more devastatingly attacked Catholicism and the Spanish State’s brutal oppression.
Loosely based on a novel Halma, Buñuel’s film, if read only
narratively, is the tale of a young Catholic novitiate (Silvia Pinal), who
almost on the eve of her taking vows, is sent by her Mother Superior to visit
her supposedly ill uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), who has paid for much of
her religious education. Anyone who has seen a Buñuel film knows that such a
voyage—particularly one that involves a “return,” which critic Marcel Olms
argues is at the core of this film—can only bode ill. When the first scene of
the Don Jaime estate is represented by a young child jumping rope, with the
camera lingering on her joyful exercises from the waist down seemingly forever,
we already know that things can only end badly for the beautiful and innocent
Viridiana.
Her uncle immediately perceives how
closely Viridiana resembles her aunt, whom he married only to suffer her death
the night of their wedding (Buñuel is careful never to tell us how such a strange
coincidence might have occurred). At first all seems placid enough as Viridiana
settles into Don Jaime’s wealthy, but Medieval-like antiquated estate. But as
the time approaches when she will return to the convent, things quickly change.
We have already observed that the elderly landowner—who far from being ill,
seems fairly robust—secretly takes out the clothing he has saved from his dead
wife, dressing up in the some of the articles, while obsessively stoking his
wife’s shoes, foretelling the old shoe-fetishist of Buñuel’s 1964 picture Diary of a Chambermaid. For her part,
Viridiana seems preoccupied with self-flagellatory acts, setting out a bed upon
the floor while shuffling various crowned thorns; during a long sleepwalking
incident, she deposits ashes she has gathered from the mansion hearth on her
host’s bed, symbolic, she later suggests, of either penitence or his
wished-for-death.
Don Jaime’s loyal servant, Ramona, and her
nearly wild daughter, meanwhile, are expert voyeurs, who report their findings
back to their employer. On the eve of Viridiana’s leaving, the old man begs her
to dress up in the wedding gown his wife wore on the day of her death. After
first refusing, Viridiana suddenly shows up, ravishingly beautiful, in the gown,
to her uncle’s astonishment and delight. But he further repels her by proposing
marriage, even if it remains, as he promises her, entirely sexless. She is
about to leave, before, seemingly regretting his declarations, he begs her to
stay just a little longer, promising no more assaults. She reluctantly agrees,
while Ramona, brewing tea, infuses it—with the old man’s instructions—with a
drug that puts her to sleep.
Intending to rape her, Don Jaime only kisses
her breasts before somewhat chastely re-buttoning her blouse and retreating,
obviously being too gentlemanly to actually go through with the act. But when
Viridiana awakens, determined to immediately leave, he tells her that she
cannot return, for she is a changed woman, that he has “made her his forever.”
With even greater determination, Viridiana dresses and calls for her suitcase,
Don Jaime finally admitting the truth, that he has not raped her, and pleading for
her to stay. But all of this does no good, as the novice escapes the house of
horrors.
One might describe the rest of the film
as a continuation of Viridiana’s education in the folly and foibles of human
beings, representing to her the absurdity of imbuing the human species with
noble qualities that the society in which they live do not allow them even
imagine, let alone aspire to. It is the remarkable way in which the director
reveals these lessons that ultimately makes Viridiana
one of his very best works, a film in my mind that stands with Exterminating Angel as his greatest of
motion pictures.
Upon the unexpectedly early return of
Jorge and Viridiana, most of them scatter away like the bad children they have
been, but two, more drunk perhaps and certainly more violent, remain,
threatening Viridiana with rape and rendering Jorge unable to protect her. At
the very last moment, Jorge returns to consciousness, convincing the
co-conspirator to kill his fellow rapist before he completes the act.
It hardly matters, however, that
Viridiana retains her virginity, for she is now, through the psychological
terrorism she has suffered, truly a “changed” woman, incapable of even
imagining the acts of mercy she once aspired to.
The last grand operatic scene of this
grand melodrama ends in Jorge’s room as we see him about to bed the servant
Ramona, with whom he has developed a relationship since his mistress left. Just
as they are about to begin, there is a knock at the door. It is Viridiana, now
with her hair down and carefully brushed, clearly ready to enter into a sexual
liaison with her “cousin.” When she sees Ramona, she is about to leave, until
Jorge calls her in to join in a card game with the two of them, suggesting that
he has always known that they would “play cards together,” Buñuel’s camera
pulling back out through the open door.
When Spanish censors refused to permit
Buñuel to film the scene as he had originally planned, by having Viridiana
enter Jorge’s room and closing the door behind her, the wily director changed
it to the much more evocative scenario I describe above, which, in its clear
implications of a soon-to-be sexual ménage-a-trois, is far more risqué than the
original.
The film showed out of competition at the
Cannes Film Festival, but unprecedentedly won the Palme D’Or nonetheless. The
Spanish representative at the festival immediately declared the film Spain’s
1961 official entry; but after the event, Spain dissociated itself from the
work, banning the film, and going as far as to burn any outtakes that Buñuel
had left behind. The film was not shown in Spain until 1977.
The manner in which I have contexualized
the film above is a variation of most of the critics’ reactions to this film,
almost all agreeing that Buñuel, in this work, was once again excoriating
church and state. Perhaps Marcel Martin summarized this position most
eloquently, writing:
He [Buñuel] is a
great social moralist who has no
illusions
about human nature
but who understands and makes us
understand (like Brecht) that people are too often corrupted
by the conditions of their lives and that you have to reform
society before you can hope to transform human beings.
understand (like Brecht) that people are too often corrupted
by the conditions of their lives and that you have to reform
society before you can hope to transform human beings.
Even
if I agree that this is the major trajectory of Buñuel’s narrative, however,
the film, in its ebullient almost Bosch-like satire of the human species, seems
somehow to ignore the humanist filmmaker that we had seen previously in some of
the Mexican films of the decade before. Is the world so corrupt, we must
finally ask, that there is no alternative for a woman like Viridiana but the
cold, sexual fling with Jorge (and, apparently, Ramona) that she, at film’s
end, is about to embrace?
If Viridiana
is primarily a kind of harangue against corrupt power, I would argue, it is
also a more caring study of the possibilities of human relationships. If
instead of looking at the film as a kind of ongoing flow of narrative events centered
upon the young novice, we were to look at the work in terms of its explicitly
delineated episodes, we might easily perceive it as an investigation into
different forms of love, with the director exploring their effects upon the
individual.
Obviously, living in the communal world
of a convent, Viridiana is like a child, not far different from the squadrons
of passing school boys with which the film begins. The convent and its
structures is like an ancient model of family life, with each member being told
her place and duties and given instruction of how and what to think about the
world. As reward for this permanent infantilism, the nuns are rewarded near
unconditional love from their superiors and, for believers such as Viridiana,
by God. Although the Mother Superior under which Viridiana lives has already
packed her bags and made the decision about her trip to visit her uncle, she
poses the possibilities of the voyage as questions you might offer a child:
“Wouldn’t you like to go on a trip to visit your uncle?” It is only when the
young novice balks at the idea, that it becomes clear that she has no choice,
as it becomes evident that everything has been decided for her.
Although
this may represent a kind of love, it is an emotion, as we learn later, that is
based on reward and, in particular, punishment, not on desire or, most
certainly, free-will and intellect. It
is an unthinking love that is centered on passivity, the women of the convent
being forced to give up their lives—and with it any ratiocination—to God and
their order’s lethal embrace. Certainly there is no choice nor reason involved
with this kind of love.
So too, do we quickly perceive, reason
is missing from the kind of romanticized vision of love represented by Don
Jaime. The uncle’s love is something not of the present, of the real world, but
of the past, of the dead: the object of love being whisked away the moment the
love is enacted. Without any reality, is a love filled with obsessions (the
voyeurism, fetishism, and other uncontrollable urges that we see played out in
many of Buñuel’s films) which only fuel further infatuations. Love, in this
form, hardly ever results in consummation, but as in Wagner’s Tristam and Isolde, is centered upon an
unfulfilled desire. As we see through the model of Don Jaime, any consummation
of the act—even a lie of consummation—can only end in death. This ancient form
of love, Buñuel helps us to perceive, is the most destructive of all in its
inability to allow expression.
Given her religious upbringing and the
numerous homilies of church going notions of mercy, it is little wonder that,
after her brush with the creepy carnality of romanticism, Viridiana chooses to
enact her love in spiritual terms, bringing together a kind of impossible
family, made even more loveable to her by their being so impossible to love.
Although she may feel that she is offering the individuals she has chosen
“something” in her very act of loving them, she cannot recognize that it is a
meaningless love unless the lover can return the emotion. The beggars and
cheats she has chosen may certainly recognize her kindness and enjoy the very
fact that she has chosen to embrace them, but it’s clear they have no ability
to truly share her saintly sensations. In fact, in loving in this manner, there
need for a real object, for this love, ultimately, is a self-love, a love that
rewards the lover in the very knowledge that she has able to find it within
herself to proffer such mercy. Like a bubble, such a self-inflated love is
always doomed to burst, as it does when the celebrants, in mockery of her
Christian teachings, recreate a kind of orgiastic vision of love that Viridiana
might have imagined closer to Satan’s perversities. Indeed, in the marvelous
scene in which a woman beggar promises the others to take their photograph—while
they pose quickly in a scene reminiscent of Di Vinci’s “The Last Supper”—only
to lift her dress to reveal her cunt, the director inverts Viridiana’s vision
of love to show everything it isn’t: no body, no feeling, no humor, no
absurdity troubles her inflated self- infatuation.
The final vision of love Buñuel conjures
up might be described, in the context of his film, as modern love: like the
popular song now being played on Jorge’s record-player, it is a love so transitory and empty that it
need not even be shown or talked about. We can easily imagine it: Ramona lying
on one side of Jorge, Viridiana on the other as he kisses and hugs each of
them, turning to fuck them each, one by one. It will end in a few days, weeks,
months, leaving nothing, not even memory, behind it.
The director does not offer us an
alternative. And, in that sense, one might argue his examination of the
potential of love is just as bleak as is his overall social satire. But here, I
would argue, Buñuel does ask us, as
we retreat from the door of the final failed vision of love, to imagine another
version of love that we might seek for our lives, a love that does not create a
prison, that does entail the nonexistence of the other, that does not merely
involve our desires or motives, that is not just about temporarily fulfilling
our bodily desires.
As far as I can see, there is no evidence
of any of these potential qualities in Buñuel’s damned beings. But there is one
single incidence that stands out. Given what we have seen, we could hardly
describe Jorge as a commendable figure; we might describe Jorge as practical,
an achiever who may even restore Don Jaime’s estate to its former glory, but he
is no potential hero or model of possible restorative behavior. Yet in one
instance, he suddenly appears out of character. Observing a small odd-jobber’s
car to which a small dog is tied, the dog forced to trot continuously at the
speed of the car, Jorge berates the driver for torturing the poor beast. The
driver not only justifies his treatment of the dog, but argues that it is a
good rabbit hunter because he keeps the pet hungry as well. Jorge demands that
he let him purchase the dog, and takes the animal from under the cart, pulling
him, at first somewhat against the dog’s will, toward him (an image that again
repeats the film’s sublimated symbols of chains and nooses). Clearly, we
recognize the futility of the act; a second later another car appears along the
same road with yet another dog tied to its underside. Yet out of no self-gain,
evidently simply out of kindness, Jorge has saved the pup and made him his own
pet.
This clearly does not represent a version
of human love which we have just been pondering. But it does, nonetheless, hint
at a kind of selfless behavior that does not simply reward one’s own ego.
Presumably, as a pet in the estate manor, this mutt will at least have a more
loving and less brutal life. And that very fact might point us in yet another
direction.
If only those ignorant Spanish censors
had allowed Viridiana to enter Jorge’s room alone and close the door behind
her, we might have been able to hope that, with her more visionary perception
of life along with his practical, down-to-earth capabilities, the two might
have been able to redeem each other, he fulfilling her sexual desires and she
ministering to his spiritual emptiness.
Well, Ramona too has good qualities, has
kept this house in order for years. Perhaps the three of them can work it out!
Los Angeles, June
7, 2014
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