Tristana (1970)

(On TV, November 2021) I know just enough about Luis Bunuel’s filmography to expect the unexpected — from the wild surrealism of his earliest films to the more controlled comedy of his last, to the melodrama of his Mexican period and the satire of his Spanish years, who knows what you’ll get with each new film? In Tristana, I certainly got bits and pieces of nearly everything else in his career: intense melodrama with perverted material, social critique, distasteful cruelty, a battered protagonist, and restrained direction despite the lurid subject matter… it’s a surprisingly quiet (even glacially-paced) film but it has quite a bit of material to chew on. Catherine Deneuve is interesting here, zigzagging her own image as a beautiful woman in various ways that run counter to what viewers may expect. I can’t say that I liked Tristana (can one really like Bunuel films?) but it’s intermittently interesting and certainly one of the purest expressions of Bunuel’s lifelong obsessions as put on film.