Tristana (1970)
Stodgy two-men-one-woman melodrama from Luis Buñuel, lacking the violent fire of his Spanish-exile work and the wry playfulness of his later work. There's some interesting moments early on (the bell-based nightmare is as close as this gets to prime Luis); eventually, though, everything sinks into a swamp of Sirkian sludge, except Sirk would at least have the good sense to go ridiculously over the top with this material. Fernando Rey shows up and does the dissolute-European thing that was his stock in trade, while Catherine Denueve, surprisingly, is a porcelain-masked non-entity (the distance between her early girlish naivety and later jaded manipulativeness can be measured in microns). Religion gets replaced by capitalism, the innocent get corrupted, love is anything but pure, ho hum. I already saw Viridiana, thanks all the same.
Grade: C
Stodgy two-men-one-woman melodrama from Luis Buñuel, lacking the violent fire of his Spanish-exile work and the wry playfulness of his later work. There's some interesting moments early on (the bell-based nightmare is as close as this gets to prime Luis); eventually, though, everything sinks into a swamp of Sirkian sludge, except Sirk would at least have the good sense to go ridiculously over the top with this material. Fernando Rey shows up and does the dissolute-European thing that was his stock in trade, while Catherine Denueve, surprisingly, is a porcelain-masked non-entity (the distance between her early girlish naivety and later jaded manipulativeness can be measured in microns). Religion gets replaced by capitalism, the innocent get corrupted, love is anything but pure, ho hum. I already saw Viridiana, thanks all the same.
Grade: C
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