Tristana

Saw Tristana, a Luis Buñuel film about a pretty girl, Tristana, who must go to live with a corrupt and decadent gentleman who takes her in after her own parents die. He is a proud, rich socialist. He rails against religion and insists that the poor must be looked after. He's far enough along with the sexual revolution to proposition his ward and insists that they must never marry, so great is his embrace of modernity. Of course his stance is fairly self-serving. He doesn't suffer from not marrying her. This is once again Buñuel using sex to skewer the smug, respectable progressives of his time.

As the film wears on, we see the effects of his treatment to her, both the effect on her and on him. The film is a kind of self-aware farse. The rich man complains that he doesn't want to "play the part" of a rich old fool. One of the servants is mute and communicates by wild gesticulation. The characters roughly fit the archetypes of the Commedia Dell'arte. This film has all the cruelty of a comedy but the cruelty is not funny as it would be in a comedy, but sinister and biting as in a melodrama. The protagonist herself calcifies into a sinister, wheelchair-bound spinster near the end.

The film was interesting but I think it got the better of me. I'm usually able to "solve" Buñuel's work simply by being aware of his hatred of the self-satisfied middle-class and his use of sexual perversion as a means to explode that self-satisfaction. Here however, the film is more realistic, feeling more like a melodrama or something. I can't quite fit everything together.