Tristana: Una passione morbosa

In the 30's, in Spain, the teenager Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) becomes an orphan when her mother, who is the servant of Don Lope (Fernando Rey), dies. Don Lope is a decadent but respected aristocrat, anticlerical and liberal with socialist principles, and he becomes the guardian of Tristana. Don Lope sexually abuses of Tristana and develops a strange lover/father relationship with her.

When Tristana meets the painter Horacio (Franco Nero), they fall in love with each other and Tristana flees from Don Lope. However, years later, Horacio brings Tristana back to Don Lope with a terminal disease on her leg. She has a severed leg and survives, and Don Lope asks her hand in marriage. She accepts but now Tristana is a bitter and cynical woman and Don Lope feels the consequence of his acts in the past.

"Tristana" is a morbid tale of lost of innocence by Luis Buñuel. I had seen this film for the last time on 05 Feb 2003 and despite the wonderful performances of Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, it is not among my favorite Buñuel's films. As usual, the director criticizes the Church and the bourgeois class but his famous surrealism is only presented in Tristana's nightmare. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Tristana"

Luis Buñuel had a mastery of screen technique attained by very few directors. Confronted by the script of Tristana, what contemporary director would know where to start?

Buñuel's attention to detail is extraordinary. Every scene is packed with visual interest. In some strange way, the decor forms an essential part of the structure; it is a facet of Buñuel's unique vision. Moreover, he not only knows exactly when to end a sequence, but how to end it. For instance, when Don Lope (Rey) puts down the dog and walks away, the camera follows not him but the dog: an endearing and brilliant touch, and there are many more. Compelling throughout, even spellbinding.

If this film were a framed picture hanging in a gallery, thousands would come to see it and Buñuel would be acclaimed as a great artist. He was a great artist, in fact, but the cinema is an ephemeral form and people forget. We need to buy the videos and watch these fine movies from time to time, just to remind ourselves that a film can be a significant art form and not merely a commercial product cynically synthesised to extract the largest amount of money from the greatest number of people.

I can't say I know Luis Bunuel's style well, since I've not seen many of his works, and those that I've seen usually just struck me as blah. But then yesterday I saw Tristana which starred Catherine Deneuve and was awe-struck by it. See, the comments that I've read online about it have seem to have the focus all wrong, they are more interested in commenting on Bunuel's usual attack on the bourgeois and catholicism. Yes it is dark and in some places rather surreal, but above all, Tristana is a simple and sad story about its characters as they grapple with life, love, loss and regret. It is especially well-crafted with its sinewed study of human relationships, and humans that desperately try to relate with each other.

Tristana, played brilliantly by Catherine Denueve, is the central character whom we see evolve from an innocent young girl with her many ideals about love and relationship, to a bitter and cynical woman at the film's end who cannot believe in anything any longer. It is with special finesse that Deneuve plays her, that we witness, with heartbreak, every turn of her back on the things she love, and every rejection of all morality that she held before.

Fernando Rey's character is probably the murkiest but ultimately most empathetic character, as at the end of the film, age wears off his hard-edged cynicism and turns him into the loving father figure that Tristana desperately needed in the beginning of the film. In a sense, it is a film about age, how when we reach a certain point in our lives we see things much clearer and as it is, rather than try to twist things to our advantage. The way Rey's character treasures the time with the vile and vindictive Tristana at the end of the film is not only overwhelmingly sad, but also an epiphany by an auteur who is gaining age himself.

In spite of all its dramatic turns of events, Tristana is not an emotional and angsty film in its portrayal of its characters' lives. Instead it is a soft and peaceful film that sympathetically accepts its characters' flaws as much as it forgives them. It is a film that evokes the intricate feeling of looking back in our dark and troubled past and finding the exquisite moments of happiness amidst all the cynicism and grit. When, towards the end, Rey reaches the peace that he has been struggling so hard to attain throughout the film, he notes, 'It's snowing so hard outside, but in this house, I'm nice and warm. What's there not to be happy about?'. A silent recognition that peace is not bending reality to your own will, but merely, acceptance.

It might appear to the uninitiated that Luis Bunuel is making with Tristana at first a good but very predictable melodrama that turns somewhere in the second half mark into a strange power-play of desire turned on its head. But in reality, when looking at it after seeing a couple of his films, Bunuel's work with Tristana is somehow kind of touching. He cares about all of his characters- none of whom what they seem or dumbed down to Lifetime movie levels- and in this stuck-in-its-ways society there are boundaries that are crossed in tragic means. Usually one might expect some dark or subtle comedy of manners or satire on society, but here it's stripped away, as it was for some of Viridiana, and all that's left is a spare, tense and expertly manipulated tale where the tables are turned once or twice on the couple of Don Lope (Fernando Rey) and Tristana (Catherine Deneauve, maybe her most physically demanding of her two Bunuel roles).

One thing that's extraordinary about how Bunuel directs and allows for his actors to play the scenes is that the emotions are only heightened to a certain level, and never with the aid of things like music or tears. It is what it is: Don Lope has taken care of Tristana as her guardian since her mother died, and now has inserted himself as her father/husband figure, with his servant Saturna (stern-faced but understanding Lola Gaos) a kind of unofficial confessional. Tristana wants some freedom, just to go out and walk around, and feels caught by Don Lope even when not doing anything... until she meets Franco Nero's Don Horacio, a painter who could promise a new life. This goes without saying that one should take it for granted that Tristana isn't *that* young and could take care of herself without Lope, but maybe this is part of the point of the slight absurdity- and eventual tragedy- of this struggle.

Two years go by after she leaves Lope for Horacio, with a tumor in her leg. She's now a cripple, and now once again a kind of mental prisoner in Lope's home; the complexity of old man Lope as being duplicitous is seen right after he finds out she's sick and Horacio asks for Lope to help keep her home, and he nearly skips home saying "she'll never leave again!" All of this, leading up to a final twist that is very satisfying if extending the tragic dimension of Lope and Tristana, would be soapy and tawdry and, possibly, very standard in other hands. For Bunuel, there's a lot of personal ground here; I wonder at times if Rey is a little like one of those actors a director of Bunuel's auteur-stature uses as a means of expressing himself through an actor, or if it's just because he's so good at playing wicked AND sympathetic bourgeois. And the mixture of ideas, if not really themes, covering what's love and over-control, religion, deformity, a free will are potent and exciting even in such subtle and (as Maltin said) serenely filmed territory.

It's also a minor triumph for Deneuve, who between this and Belle de jour did some of her best work as an actress for the notorious surrealist. Her character's continual dream of Lope's beheaded top dangling from a church tower is the closest we see to a classic surrealist scene, though it's reminiscent of Los Olvidados as brilliantly expressing one character's mind-set. Deneuve is up for the challenge of putting up a tough interior and exterior presence; she gets paler towards the end (if this was for real or just a bad print I couldn't tell), and there's a lot of pain in her eyes and expression throughout. It's great work for one of the director's most subtly demanding works- beneath its conventional framework of a love-triangle story is sorrow and horror at the human condition.

I like all films by Buñuel, and I don't think any of his films are boring. Yet, even if they could be very remarkable, some films are much "cheaper", less perfect than others, maybe because they were on a more limited budget. Tristana, though, is one of the perfect ones, in terms well-made:ness. I haven't got much to complain about this film. There is only one piece of music, and obviously Buñuel didn't put much music in his films, but it's acceptable, perhaps a good thing. The acting is very good. Rey is very good. I find the most impressive things to be the script and the dialog, which are fantastic.

Not the most surrealistic work, yet, probably one of Buñuel's ten most well-made.