After spending a few days with her uncle, Viridinia tells him she was ordered to come. When Don Jaime's niece arrives he is astonished by her beauty and her strong resemblance to his dead wife. Since he is her only living relative and the one that is paying for her schooling she accepts after her mother superior orders her into going.ĭon Jaime is a private man, living on a neglected farm with only a few servants that help him, one named Ramona, and Ramona's young daughter Rita who is first seen jumping rope on his property. She is uncertain of wanting to visit him since she doesn't know him very well. She is told that her uncle, Don Jaime can't come to see her take her vows but has invited her to see him. Handel’s “Messiah,” plays during the opening credits as the next shot shows a church and a young novice named Viridinia played by the beautiful Sylvia Banala who is about to take her vows but is suddenly called in to see her mother superior. A third that he didn't mention, I suspect, was to make this particular film. He told various stories, one was that he was offered four times his salary by a producer, and another was that he felt nostalgia for his homeland. Many of Bunuel's admirers wondered why he would return to Spain at a time when the fascist dictator Franco was still in power. Luis Buñuel shot Viridiana in the early months of 1961, in his native Spain, and it was the first film he had made since his departure for the United States and Mexico in 1939. The Spanish government who had initially approved the film’s submission at Cannes (although virtually no one in Spain had seen it) suddenly banned the film and it wasn't shown in Spain until 1977. ![]() When originally released the film caused a tremendous stir within the Catholic world, starting with the Vatican’s newspaper which was instantly up in arms with the film, describing it as "blasphemous". A blind man gets jealous, because the woman in question is the one he regards as his, smashing everything on the table. And in one of the most iconic moments in the cinema, everyone drunkenly lines up along one side of the table for a photograph (in which the photographer instead lifts up her dress to flash her audience) as this sequence closely resembles Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper. Others join in the dance, everyone gets drunker, one of the men sexually assaults one of the women behind the sofa in front of her own child. One of the small babies of the beggars cries, two women have an appalling fight, a leper puts on the phonograph of a recording of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” to which he himself dances to while wearing the corset and veil of a dead bride. In a wonderfully wicked cut, Buñuel moves straight from an early moment of this exploration to a later stage of the banquet in which the main course is over, where they're empty wine bottles scattered everywhere, and most of the beggars are already drunk. ![]() In one of the funniest and shocking moments of the film, homeless beggars explore the insides of a wealthy estate, admiring the portraits, the linen, the expensive silverware, and eventually decide to have a feast. His greatest film Viridiana is not anti-Catholic nor against religion, but it told a scandalous story about a virtuous nun, her rich perverted uncle and a hansom young lustful son, and included a bleak and pessimistic ending that involved the nun leaving the convent, and quietly entering the bedroom of her cousin and another women which suggested a ménage-a-trois. ![]() ![]() First and foremost Bunuel was a satirist and was a master at black comedy it was just the topics he chose to satirize didn't go over very well with the public. He also had a streak of pessimism and nihilism, presenting the cruel, bleak and destructive views of human existence. And yet his films are never bitter, angry or lacking charm. Right in the opening title shots of Bunuel's greatest masterpiece Viridiana, you hear Handel's classic 'Messiah', and you automatically know this isn't going to be a religious picture. Luis Bunuel is one of the most brilliant and cynical directors of all time, a man full of sexual fetishes, surreal and mistaken identities, and absurdities of normal situations taken into a different context. They aren't necessarily a bad child, they just enjoy pointing out the absurdities in the most serious of subject matters. There is always one young child like Luis Bunuel in every Sunday school class, a child who acts mischievous and pulls pranks on their religious teachers.
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