Luis Buñuel | Tristana / 1970

a revenge comedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julio Alejandro and Luis Buñuel (screenplay, based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós), Luis Buñuel (director) Tristana / 1970

 

It continues to annoy me that many critics perceive the great filmmaker Luis Buñuel as a basically immoral rebel fascinated by sadomasochism. In reviewing his 1970 film, Tristana, the usually level-headed Roger Ebert even goes to far as to write:

 

“The subject matter came out of his lifelong obsessions. His favorite subjects were sado-maschoism and anticlericalism ever since his first movie with Salvador Dali, Un Chien Andalou (1928), and in the late flowering of his work in the his 70s he became undoubtedly the dirtiest old man of genius the cinema has ever produced.”

 

     While it is clear that the director was virulently anticlerical, given the tradition of the Spanish church leaders their involvement with the military right and continuation of the most patriarchal of cultural values, his position might be seen as a thoroughly moral one. And, yes, a great many of his films seem fixated on sado-masochistic situations, particular Virdiana and Belle de Jour, the latter of which also stars the heroine of Tristana (the beautiful Catherine Deneuve), but it is not Buñuel, I would argue, who is trapped in these often morally reprehensible situations as much as it is the characters of his works, all products of the corrupt societies he clearly exposes in his films, particularly in works such as Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

     In the 1970 film Tristana, Don Lupe Garrido (Fernando Rey), is ostensibly a model figure of the 1920s in Toledo. A liberal man of a wealthy childhood, Don Lope is a polished aristocrat without aristocratic affectations, himself refusing to work because of the evils of industrialism. His intellectual support is for the down-trodden and working class, and he later hires the street urchin, the deaf, trouble-maker Saturno (Jesús Fernández), whose mother, Saturna (Lola Gaos), works as his cook. His not notable public problem is that he is slowly running out of money, and must sell some of his cherished possessions to support himself and his staff.

   Don Lope’s secret problem regards his attitude toward women. A staunch supporter of open sexuality—he has sex only if he can get the woman to agree, an unusual position in his day. Yet as a hedonist dandy who believes in open relationships, he refuses to be tied down by marriage, often the only position a woman might enter in order to survive.

     Left an orphan, the young Tristana is adopted, through the directive of her dead mother, by Don Lope, and at the age of 19 is sent to live in his house. Although he first treats her as a loving daughter, as the innocent girl begins to flower into adulthood, he grows more and more lustful, finally “receiving” her permission to rape her through a kiss. What he cannot or will not comprehend is that given his role in her life and the lack of alternatives for the girl, she has little choice but to accept the sexual advances of the old man, although she increasingly finds him abhorrent. As she tells her confident, Saturna: if only he had been able to keep the relationship as a familial one she might have loved him and been able to serve her as a dutiful daughter.

     As it is, she increasingly seeks a way out of what he defines as an “open” relationship. Ignoring his desires, she daily takes walks through the streets, eventually meeting a handsome young artist, Horacio (Franco Nero), with whom she quickly falls in love.

 

    After several trysts, she determines to leave Don Lope and run away with Horacio. Despite Don Lope’s discovery of their relationship, and his attempt to challenge Horacio to a duel, the two manage to escape to the city and have an apparently happy relationship for at least two years, without marrying, since, influenced by Don Lope, she too now believes that love is more important than the patriarchal institution that binds women to their spouses.

     When Tristana develops a leg tumor, she inexplicably insists that Horacio take her back to Don Lope, who now has come into a large inheritance through the death of his hated sister. We later discover that Tristana’s insistence that he return her to the man she once hated, however, may have been a test of Horacio’s own love and his ability and commitment to care for her.

     As it is, she moves back to Don Lope’s house, as the two omen arrange for a kind of ménage à trois, as she meets regularly with both Horacio and Tristana, while the old man ludicrously hopes to bring her back exclusively into his own bed, particularly since Tristana has now had her leg amputated. In short she is trapped, at least symbolically, within the relationship. Unable to deal with her amputation and with the increasingly angry woman she has become, Horacio soon leaves her, returning to the city.

      Bitter about the way she has been treated by both men, Tristana has slowly found a way to rule his house, particularly since the aging Don Lope no longer has the strength to opposer her. Don Lope is even enticed to attend mass with her, finally submitting to marriage. Soon after, Don Lope, a long-time hater of the Catholic clergy, even invites the priests into his house for cocoa and sugar, while they attempt to coax him into leaving money for the church.

    At moments, the now chaste Tristana, sexually toys with her servant, opening her breasts to him as he works beneath her balcony, forcing him to back off into the woods to masturbate, an act which throughout the film he has comically accomplished in long-closed sessions in the bathroom.

     When one night Don Lope cries out while suffering from a heart attack, Tristana comes rushing to his side, pretending to call the doctor and, when she determines he is near death, opening his bedroom window to the cold night air, careful to close it again shortly before the doctor arrives to pronounce him dead.

    She is now the inheritor of Don Lope’s estate. In short, Tristana, the former victim, has gradually become a sort of feminist heroine now in control of what in her culture is nearly always held by males: money and an estate.

      But for what purpose, we are led to ask. Was it worth all the suffering and pain she has had to undergo to reach this position? Although Tristana, at film’s end, is in control of her own life, she now has no one to share it with, and she will likely live out the years in the kind of better coldness we have witnessed in Don Lupe’s sister. Revenge is hers, but it is a comic revenge in which Tristana as ended up as a kind of stock figure, the former beauty having been transformed into an angry beast.

     Although Tristana has won the battle of the sexes, the director reveals that since she has lost her moral ground in the process, she remains unable to find happiness and remains as frustrated as she might have been serving within the confines of the patriarchal world which she has bested.

    

Los Angeles, November 1, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2013).