This is not by any means the most blasphemous sequence in the film it is simply the most obvious and gleeful of its provocations. The biggest factor in this controversy is the infamous reenactment of The Last Supper that occurs during the big destructive sequence at the end, a “photograph” of the banquet taken by one of the beggars by lifting her dress to flash all of the posing, drunken revelers. The film was branded as blasphemous by the Vatican and banned in Spain, the country that produced it, for 16 years following its completion in 1961. The vagabonds’ intents and the eventual results of their actions are not the same they can not help their sense of irresponsibility any more than anyone else can repress their own natures. Near the beginning of the sequence, as the debate of whether or not to go inside is hashed out, the inevitability of what will follow is inescapable, but even so, as you watch the scenario play out, you don’t doubt (entirely, anyway) that a debate is going on, and not just being enacted out of a sense of wishfully exculpatory ceremony. The shelter’s tenants first break into the mansion with the idea of looking around and wind up having a bacchanalian destruction derby. The film’s most famous sequence occurs near the end, when Viridiana and Jorge leave the grounds to meet with a lawyer in town. They go along with it, embracing her naïveté warm-heartedly, and occasionally reproaching one another when someone slips there are some bad seeds, but the system stays together. The issue is that none of these people have any interest in Viridiana’s churchy model of life, they just want to eat, drink, and screw and have a place to sleep at the end of the night. Everyone is assigned a job and contributes to the benefit of the overall group as long as they do that and pray, they are welcome. She sets about to create a life for them where they can eventually learn to take care of themselves. Her face is no longer obscured in darkness but glowing in bright lights in shunning the church she comes to live a pious life in the manner she had originally been hoping for, converting the barn of the estate into a boarding house for the town’s destitute and sickly residents. Upon learning of Jaime’s death, Viridiana opts out of her vows and, almost immediately, steps out from under the shadow Buñuel has been consistently covering her in throughout the course of the film. He leaves the estate to her and his estranged playboy son, Jorge, who immediately sets to work trying to turn the land into a farm. Jaime shortly hangs himself with a jump rope. Viridiana, horrified and upset, doesn’t accept his apology and leaves immediately. In the end, he grows mortified with himself and is unable to execute the plan, which he confesses to her the following morning. When he realizes she has no interest in him, he conspires with his maid to drug her in order to forcibly disqualify her from the Order by “taking her virtue,” forcing her to stay with him due simply to her lack of prospects. Jaime slowly and sadly falls in love with his niece, her uncanny resemblance to his dead wife being one of his main triggers. Viridiana’s coldness towards her benefactor is meant to seem odd, her sincere piousness doesn’t succeed in masking her dissociative nature, exemplified by her ability to not care about her uncle and, later, to not pick up on her own charges’ complete lack of interest in the brand of saintly life she’s trying to sell them. Upon first meeting him, she tells him it’s too late for them to have any sort of a meaningful personal connection, and proceeds to interact with him as politely as she can manage. Still, Mother Superior insists, so off she goes to Jaime’s large estate, where she meets a man who has, since the death of his wife, lived in near solitude, crippled by self-imposed loneliness. While Jaime has financially supported Viridiana for a long time, he has never gotten to know his niece and she is surprisingly adamant, at least as far as imminent nuns go, in her lack of sympathy and interest. Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is a novitiate, almost ready to take her vows and happy to do so, who gets word that her uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), is near death. Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana isn’t as outwardly surreal as some of his other work, yet it sustains an alien feeling throughout, almost entirely due to its bizarre narrative arc. Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
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