Viridiana

Spain the manor, "una casa de mucho respeto" gone to weeds and spiders, it gets electricity at last. About to take her vows, the novitiate (Silvia Pinal) leaves the convent to see her uncle, a goatish recluse (Fernando Rey). The spitting image of his late wife, she's attired in marital whites and drugged with Hitchcock's Notorious cup. The interrupted ravishment is glimpsed by a little girl, who climbs to the window after being roused by a nightmare ("un toro negro"). The don is last seen dangling from a tree, his niece chooses to stay and turn the old mansion into a colony for vagrants—determined saint or corruptible blonde, "rotten with piety." Variations on new beginnings, as befits Luis Buñuel's subversive homecoming under Generalissimo Franco's nose. The widower trying on his beloved's heels and the heroine with suitcase bulging with hammers and crowns of thorns are contemplated with the same blank gaze, just a matter of different kinds of fetishes. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me..." The cousin (Francisco Rabal) is a practical fellow, his bored mistress (Victoria Zinny) takes off so he helps himself to the maid (Margarita Lozano). Cats pounce on rodents in a Stroheim image, dogs meanwhile yearn to go back to the masters who tie them to carts. (Another complicated joke is built from the wry montage mingling prayers with wheelbarrows, bricks and mortar, "laborare est orare.") A calm surrealism follows the moppet's jump-rope as it becomes a noose and a beggar's belt, a found object combines crucifix and blade, "what an idea!" The Boudu element is gleefully dilated for Buñuel's remarkable climax, soiled linens and smashed porcelain and the eyeless crank in the Jesus chair for the snatch snapshot. From Handel chorales to jukebox thumping (cf. Simon of the Desert), then cards shuffled for "the censor's filthy synecdoche." Cinematography by José F. Aguayo. With José Calvo, José Manuel Martín, Joaquín Roa, Luis Heredia, Lola Gaos, María Isbert, and Teresa Rabal. In black and white.