The other day I wrote not much exciting was going on in Lisbon's silver screens. It was, to quote a former colleague, “an egregious misrepresentation of the lay of the land” as Nimas, one of my hometown´s best, oldest (meaning, dating from the 1970s) and few “arthouse” (obtuse colloquialism The MacMahonian will reluctantly use for ease of reference) cinemas is showing a 25 film retrospective of Luís Buñuel, running August through December. I visited yesterday to watch Nazarín.
Nazarín was the 18th feature film, and 16th Mexican one, directed by Luis Buñuel, major figure of the Surrealist Movement, greatest Spanish director of all-time, ditto Mexican and one of the very greatest classical filmmakers of same time, up there with Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang, etc but you probably already now this, else have little business reading The MacMahonian.
Nazarín is based on a 1895 novel by Benito Perez Galdós, the second greatest, I am told, writer of the Castilian language after Cervantes and the towering figure of Spanish realism, a sort of Spanish Zola. It tells the story of the eponymous priest (Francisco Rabal) , a figure of Franciscan poverty and sainthood who inspires the adoration and love of many, mostly women, and the misunderstanding and distrust of most, often to adverse and even fatal effect, as he wanders through 19th century Mexico on a “pilgrimage”, accompanied by the devout Beatriz (Marga López) and Andara (Rita Macedo), a sort of Jesus Christ/Don Quixote figure escorted by a Mary Magdalene stand-in and a female Sancho Panza.
Not one of the most famous, Nazarín is nevertheless one of Buñuel's (many) masterpieces and by his own admission (not that it matters) one of his favourite films. Relatively sober for Buñuelean standards, the film depicts impressively one of the author's main themes: the clash between personal instinct and social convention and the ultimate defeat of the latter, seen from the perspective of a strict catholic education he later rejected but the imprint of which never left. One has the feeling Buñuel sometimes deliberately lets Rabal overact, in contrast with the rest of the (impeccable) cast, in a way instrumental to the film's eminent quality: the uncomfortable contrast between the admiration Nazarín's pious self-denial and abnegation to generosity and brotherly love elicits and the abhorrence the obscurantist hysterical repressive environment in which it takes place, to which it contributes and ultimately surrenders to, inspires. Revealingly, Nazarín won the International Award at Cannes in 1959 (the first year this prize was awarded) and it lost by one vote the (wait for it) the Prize of the Catholic Jury (!, plus didn´t even know there was such thing).
I hope to revisit Nimas in the coming months ant do revert to Buñuel in these pages subsequently.