Orare Est La bora re?

Viridiana (Kingsley International). In the first reel of the first important film directed by Spain's Luis Bunuel, something surreal called Un Chien Andalou (1929), the camera watches closely as Bunuel himself opens a straight razor and with surgical precision slits a woman's eyeball. From that frame forward, Moviemaker Bunuel left no doubt in anybody's mind that he intends to open people's eyes. In his masterpiece, Los Olmdados (1950), he opened people's eyes to the horrors of poverty in the Mexican slums. In Viridiana, a strange but powerful film that contains one episode of Goyesque genius, he attempts to open people's eyes to the evils of sentimental piety and morbid tyranny in Franco's Spain.

Surprisingly, the film was actually made in Spain. Bunuel is an anarchist, but he is also the most famous Spanish moviemaker, so Franco invited him to come home after 25 years in exile and to shoot a picture with government funds. Bunuel accepted the offer, shot Viridiana. But before Franco's censors could take a whack at it, he smuggled the film out of the country. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it won the Grand Prize for 1961.

Furious, Franco banned the picture and fired his director-general of cinema for permitting such a movie to be made in Spain. It is not hard to see why.

Viridiana tells the story of a novice (Silvia Final) who visits her sole surviving relative (Fernando Rey), an uncle in late middle age, before taking her final vows.

The girl is obviously intended to personify what is false in Spanish pietism; the uncle signifies the sickness of the ruling classes.

He is a quixotic solitary, indolent in the grand Spanish manner; he secretly preens himself in corsets worn many years before by his wife, who died on their wedding day. One night the uncle persuades Viridiana to wear his wife's wedding dress.

Then he drugs her, and when she wakes next morning in his bed, he tells her she is no longer fit to become a bride of Christ, that to save her honor she must marry him. She runs away in horror and disgust; in guilt and despair he hangs himself.

The estate falls partly to Viridiana, partly to Jorge, the uncle's practical, unprincipled, illegitimate son. Jorge works hard to make his half of the hacienda a paying proposition. Viridiana turns her half into a refuge for the rag, tag and bobtail of the province--beggars, footpads, lepers, trulls. While Jorge and his hired men work, Viridiana and her rabble pray.

Orare est laborare? Bunuel doubts it.

One day, while both Jorge and Viridiana are away from home, the lower orders rise up and breach the walls of privilege. Eager as rats they scatter through the house, squeaking and plundering, happy as fiends with a rich man's soul. Out come the linens and the candelabra, the rare wines, the cates and dainties, a whole lamb. Like dukes the poor pilgarlics sit them down to a palatial feast that rapidly degenerates into a gutter brawl. But the brawl is intended also as a rite, as the dissolution of a desiccated society in a Dionysian mystery. In the depths of it, as the rabble bawls and dances, fights and fornicates all over the house, the leper puts a record on the gramophone, and suddenly with supernal irony the scene of chaos is explained and sanctified by a great chorus roaring triumphantly to Handel's music: "And He shall reign forever and ever!" Seldom in cinema has the nature of revolution been realized with such profundity and expressed with such power. Bunuel indulges in no sentimentality about "the masses." Rabble is rabble to him; the mob is a beast with many heads that destroys both good and evil, that overwhelms humanity with animality. Nevertheless, Bunuel seems to believe that revolution is necessary in Spain, that only a revolt of the masses can dissolve its calcified social structure. But after the revolution, what? Viridiana witlessly abandons what is good in her religion along with what is bad, and the final scene suggests that she will become the mistress of Jorge, that Spain will sink into mere materialism. The film ends on Jorge's grin, as thin and nasty as a razor's edge.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.