Luis Buñuel's Tristana (1970)

Buñuel's Tristana is based on Benito Pérez Galdós's eponymous novel (1892), although it's set in Toledo in the 1920s. It stars Catherine Deneuve as Tristana, the young woman whose parents have died and Fernando Rey as her aristocratic uncle and guardian: both of their voices are dubbed into Spanish.* Lope also thinks he owns her and he takes advantage of her innocence by having sex with her. (Of course, the anarchist Buñuel again takes pot shots at any 'respectable' institutions he can, and even Lope foils the police by misdirecting them from the scent of an 'unfortunate' thief.)

Aided by the servant Saturna (Lola Gaos), Tristana breaks her uncle's rules of virtual house arrest to explore the streets of Toledo. The inevitable happens and Tristana runs away from Toledo with her young lover Horiacio (Franco Nero). But there are more things in life than Horacio can dream of and in a few years the couple return to Toledo, Tristana having an extremely painful leg. This is amputated and the course of Tristana's life, in fact much of her psychology, changes and she returns to Lope to marry him.

However, she refuses to sleep with him. And his health declines so sharply that one night he is in agony, close to death. Tristana pretends to call the doctor, and seeing that he is unconscious she opens the window where it's snowing heavily and Lope dies.

*Deneuve surely sets something of a precedent for an original film as her voice is also entirely dubbed in (sung) French in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg: there is only dubbing when she bursts into song in Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.

Luis Buñuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie | The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

This being a film directed by Buñuel, there is criticism of governmental corruption, of the bourgeoisie, of religion, the military, the police, and by extension of all institutions. Buñuel's main weapons are surrealism and/or absurdity.

At the beginning there are six people at a dinner which is an evening too early: Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey, ambassador of the (fictitious) South American Republic of Miranda), François Thévenot (Paul Frankeur), his wife Simone (Delphine Seyrig) and her sister Florence (Bulle Ogier) arrive unexpectedly at the home of Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Castel) and his wife Alice (Stéphane Audran). This is to be the first of several interrupted or non-existent eating or drinking failures, such as when François drives the others to a simple auberge he knows, although the door is at first locked but when they are seated and about to make orders they discover that there is a dead patron a few yards away. They leave hastily.

Raphael sells François and Henri a large quantity of cocaine (proved to be excellent by the fictional Harrison-Srauder test), and during the transaction Raphael looks out of the window, sees a young woman outside the Embassy of Miranda selling toys, and shoots a clockwork dog, explaining to the mystified François that she's a terrorist fighting against his government.

When the dinner is to take place again, Henri and Alice beforehand climb out of their bedroom window to have sex in the garden, causing Raphael and François to suspect that there's gong to be a raid by the drug squad, so they depart. When Henri and Alice return to the house they're surprised to find their guests have gone, although a bishop dressed as a gardener turns up and – after a slight misunderstanding – is employed as a gardener.

There's really no need to ask for explanations here, particularly as some of the later events – such as the murder of a colonel by Raphael, the assassination of all the main characters, the appearance of ghosts, etc – can usually be explained by bad dreams, even by dreams within dreams. This is, after all, a film by Buñuel. Cue for the six principal characters – as they've done several times before in the movie – to inexplicably walk down a country road together, although this final time they're not walking away from the water tower but towards it.

Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967)

 

It's a little difficult to imagine the effect that Buñuel's Belle de jour, based on Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel of the same name, could have had back in 1967, although an article in the Los Angeles Times of the day heralded it as his biggest success yet, and a masterpiece, if 'less than a masterpiece [compared to some of his earlier films], but sexy. And in color.' Catherine Deneuve plays the newly married Séverine, with the doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel) as her husband. 

The paper calls it a 'study in female sexuality', which I find too much to take. Séverine was sexually abused as a child, and the general diagnoses are that the Bovaryish Séverine is bored with her tedious doctor husband and becomes a high-class prostitute ('Belle de jour') because it satisfies her masochistic imagination, thus priming her for a 'normal' sex life with Pierre. This is how I viewed it the first time I saw the film some years ago, although now I'm not so sure. Séverine enjoys her life as a prostitute, the thrill of non-conventional sex, and then she grows to like the unhinged Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who becomes so besotted that he gets his gets his mate Hippolyte (Francisco Rabel) to follow Séverine, then in jealousy Marcel shoots Pierre, who ends up paralysed with Séverine looking after him?

OK, the coachmen taking her into the woods, whipping her and probably raping her are fantasy, as is the mud thrown at her, but how much of this are we supposed to read as fantasy and how much reality? Buñuel leaves it to us to decide, but my guess is that there's a hell of a lot more surrealism going on here than Séverine and Husson (Michel Piccoli) disappearing under the dinner table together.

Apart from the fantasy, there are some interesting pieces relating to other films here: the appearance of Buñuel himself in the film, like Hitchcock in his own films (or, principally, Truffaut in his in homages to Hitchcock), but there are also references to Godard's À bout de souffle in the selling of Herald Tribune on the Champs-Élysées, and of course the shooting in the back of Marcel by a cop echoes Michel Poiccard being shot in the back in Godard's film.

Most of all, perhaps, this is a big, stiff middle finger up to the bourgeoisie, as are many of Buñuel's films.