TRISTANA

Part of Secret Movie Club's Top 1000. A ridiculous number we know. But there are easily 1000 must see movies in cinema. Probably many of thousands. But this number feels right to us.

It was only a matter of time until Luis Buñuel, a moviemaker with a foot fetish, made a movie about a leg amputee.

But let me back up.

Buñuel's TRISTANA tells of beautiful orphaned young Tristana (a wonderful Deneuve) taken in by notorious lech Spanish nobleman Don Lope (Rey). The "liberal" Don ultimately coerces her into sleeping with him. She abandons him for a young painter (a stately Nero) but returns when she thinks she'll die of a leg tumor. Instead, the leg is amputated, she pushes the painter out of her life, and she marries Lope because the church coerces her too. And finally, in a way, she gets her revenge on all.

It is quintessential Buñuel in that the blasphemy is so in the spotlight and yet somehow passed the wary eye of the Spanish censor.

Don Luis had made his masterpiece VIRIDIANA in Spain in the early 60's. It was such a scandalous takedown of dogmatic Catholicism untethered from reality and hypocritical hyper conservative Spanish culture that dictator Franco and the regime banned it immediately. Buñuel had been an exile from his native Spain for almost 30 years. When he returned, he bit the hand that financed him HARD. Then, trying to show a more liberal face to the outside world, Spain invited him back 9 years later to make TRISTANA.

So he bit the other hand. Harder.

TRISTANA rounds out a trilogy of "Ana" movies that center around a young woman who ultimately rebels against the hypocritical societal norms by which she's supposed to abide. Yet each has a different spin.

SUSANA, the earliest, made in Mexico in the early 50's, finds the young woman already a delinquent and iconoclast. She comes to live with a traditionalist family only to undo them with lust, anger, desire, and hypocrisy.

1961's VIRIDIANA is at once the most tender and most devastating. Viridiana is a devout Catholic who returns home to her lecherous Uncle (played also by Rey) and decides, after his death, to covert the mansion into a kind of refuge for beggars and the poor. But when the poor destroy the home, refusing to conform to Viridiana's notions of how the poor should act, the Woman is forced to acknowledge reality not idealism.

TRISTANA, made in 1970, finds a young woman exploited and abused by those who are supposed to protect her. Don Lope is a ridiculous kind of Spanish nobleman with grandiose ideas of honor but who mostly just wants to sleep with young girls. A kind of LOLITA riff, TRISTANA finds Lope growing older and more ridiculous yet more infatuated with Tristana. But it also finds our title character coming into her own. She becomes a disillusioned and frustrated adult, still filled with sexuality but angry at a world that never let her give much healthy expression to it.

Buñuel fills the movie, as he always does, with profound social critique and surrealism. A severed head is the clapper of a church bell in a dream. Saturno, a deaf son of a servant, grows sexually fascinated with Tristana. A last act winter with snow has a powerful clarifying silence.

The auteur moviemaker would make one more movie in this vein with his very last movie 1977's THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (also starring Rey). Don Luis seemed forever bemused by old men who made fools of themselves with desire for young unpossessable women. So much so the repeated storyline feels like a lifelong allegory for something.

And you get the sense that Buñuel may be even more turned on by an amputee than a barefooted woman. Later lingering shots of Tristana's wooden leg on couches and beds make you feel Buñuel is fantasizing a bit himself.

But like so much great cinema, the power of this movie is in its mystery. What exactly is it saying? Why do we laugh at the ridiculous societal contortions of its characters at the same time we're a bit horrified by them?

Buñuel didn't so much hold up a mirror to society as just punch it repeatedly in the face. Always with style. Always with humour. And always with a secret held between pursed mischievous lips.

Craig Hammill is the founder/programmer of Secret Movie Club.