VIRIDIANA

Warning: Spoilers

Long exiled from his native Spain, Luis Bunuel was meant to return in triumph and create his masterpiece, which is precisely what he did though his triumph was short-lived and his masterpiece, "Viridiana", quite simply one of the greatest works of art in any medium, proved to be a source of scandal to Franco, his regime and the Vatican. What Bunuel did was to bite the hand that fed him all the way to the shoulder blade. "Viridiana" is virulently anti-Catholic, some felt to the point of blasphemy and it's imagery proved shocking way beyond the point of forgiveness. (Like all great works of art the film still shocks today, so forceful is Bunuel's message).

The storyline is simplicity itself. A young novice is asked by her uncle to visit him at his château before taking her final vows and entering the convent. Consumed by lust at her resemblance to his late wife he drugs her with the intention of raping her but then can't go through with it. Nevertheless, he tells her that he did and subsequently hangs himself. Feeling she has been violated, the novice renounces her vows but moves into her uncle's house determined to devote her life to helping the poor and flagellating herself to atone for what she sees as her sins. The film culminates in one of the most extraordinary sequences in all of cinema as the beggars she has taken in pillage the house and finally rape her in a mock re-enactment of Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' to the strains of the Alleluia Chorus.

All of this, of course, proved much too much for the conservative, staunchly Catholic regime who promptly had the film banned and had they had their way would have had all prints destroyed. Whether or not they recognized it as a devastating satire of Swiftian proportions, viciously barbed and often very funny, is debatable. (Facists are conspicuous by their lack of a sense of humour). Regardless, it sealed Bunuel's fate in Spain for the rest of Franco's reign and marked the beginning of one of his most productive periods though he was never again to reach the inspired heights he reached here. I doubt if any film made since has surpassed it.