Spain, Mexico, 1961
Directed by Luis Buñuel
With Silvia Pinal (Viridiana), Fernando Rey (Jaime), Francisco Rabal (Jorge), Margarita Lozano (Ramona)
The first part of the film is built around perversion. It starts innocuously, in a convent where well-dressed children walk in row across the court while nuns and novices briskly tend to whatever is their business. The mother superior then calls out the character who gives the film its title. Viridiana has been educated in the convent and chose to be a novice – the ceremony turning her into a nun is close but a letter from her uncle, who paid generously for her stay at the convent, asks that she pays him a visit. The mother superior presses the reluctant young woman to accept – after all, the man is old and sick, and has been so kind.
Even when she is at her uncle’s place, a sprawling but terribly neglected rural estate, Viridiana keeps being reticent and surprised by Don Jaime’s wish to be with her. She cuts a radiant figure among the sullen faces of the laborers and servants, presenting a remarkable contrast with the deeply worried face of the personal maid of her uncle, Ramona; however, once alone in her bedroom, she lapses back into the sanctimonious attitudes of the staunch believer, which stuns Ramona but leaves Jaime seemingly indifferent.
Talks between the master and the servant hint that Jaime is up to something; soon, Viridiana is forced to stay longer at his house than planned and then is asked to fulfill the strangest of wishes: wearing for one evening the wedding dress of the woman who married Jaime long ago but has died. Viridiana looks like very much to her aunt, and this is enough to upset and excite Jaime, prompting him to make his odd request.
But if his desire is astonishing, and a bit creepy, and, indeed, Jaime has come across as a mysterious and troubling man, the object of that desire is a disturbing reality: the camera has graphically emphasized the charm of Viridiana’s legs, subtly introducing eroticism in a mundane scene in the life of a zealot (she was changing clothes to go to bed, with the inevitable prayer to the Lord). Her physical beauty of course has not escaped Jaime’s attention. Moreover Viridiana turns out to be a sleepwalker: so the innocent, serious young woman must grapple with darker forces in her mind.
But there may be not as dark as the impulse that throws Jaime on the body of his niece, dressed in that gorgeous white dress and lying listless in her bed, the sleeping pills she has taken unaware, deceptively looking like sugar in her coffee, being way too powerful. The camera intensely shoots an attempted rape only the fright that his victim may be dead keeps Jaime from actually committing. Still, the film has explicitly and precisely borne witness to the willful desecration of a novice to satisfy a morbid desire, having physical pleasure again with the lookalike of the dead lover.
Viridiana does wake up – and tries to flee, even more after Jaime lets her think she has lost her virginity. The uncle accepts that she walks away – but the editing promptly shows him sitting at his desk, taking sheets of paper and a fountain pen, and then smiling (in another of the numerous close-ups that have scrutinized the man and the young woman as the former, like a bird of prey, circles around the latter). What is he up now?
The righteous believers sitting in the movie theater are in for another scandal: Jaime hangs himself with the jump rope Ramona’s girl likes to play with – it is that object that introduces her in the film at the start and that would later be used by Viridiana, in what is going to be a long, puzzling career as a leitmotif. Viridiana must come back to the estate which needs to be taken care of after that death, which runs counter to Catholic teachings, though it appears that Jaime’s son would come to the place – probably the purpose of some of the letters Jaime intended earlier to write.
The second part of the film can begin, revolving this time around subversion and distortion. It is off with a surprise decision: Viridiana, perhaps feeling guilty, even spoiled, gives up on being a nun and vows to follow God’s law and tenets as a simple lay woman doing her utmost in the most simple and unassuming way. It turns out the path she embraces is not ordinary and peaceful: she gathers all the beggars and the poor living around the nearby village to bring her at the estate, converting part of the buildings as a shelter and planning to give them food, safety, care and the chance to work to a better life. So she becomes the host of disheveled, ugly, and coarse guests, both male and female, with a couple of kids to complete the depressing picture. This is a rambunctious and unwieldy bunch grateful for her generosity but maybe not so ready to adjust to each other and even more to a good Christian life.
Christian ethics look like a burden for Jorge, too. The manly, attractive but dour-faced son of Jaime arrives with a blonde he makes clear is not a wife – he would later mock marriage and claim that it is normal that a man and a woman can get together and then, love’s pleasure having been exhausted, part ways. Jorge wants to turn his inheritance into a booming agricultural business but what fascinates him is that Viridiana tries hard to keep her distance. She is clearly ill at ease with him and focuses on guiding her poor, an effort he tends to ridicule. Neither can understand fully each other and what this strange coexistence implies.
The way it ends takes the most extraordinary narrative path. It begins innocuously: an appointment with a solicitor means that Viridiana and Jorge must spend part of a day, and probably a night, away (they are accompanied by Ramona, who has become the mistress of Jorge, and her daughter). The lead characters are off-screen, leaving the center stage to the poor, who are not keen on working but rather reckon to cook a feast. Then some of the women dare visiting the masters’ mansion – and everything get out of control.
The banquet, held in a stately dining room, becomes an orgy that causes the precious lace tablecloth to get irremediably stained and the delicate glasses to get broken; as wine is liberally poured minds get at best numbed and at worst excited, or rather over-excited; at the end the wildest behaviors seize the poor and yield farcical and shocking images: a scrawny, crooked middle-aged man with scars on his arms and a big tooth gap wears the wedding dress of Jaime’s wife while another, more handsome but more lecherous, tries to have it away with a woman behind a settee. But the most provocative moment is when a woman pretends to take a picture of the group and asks them to pose: actually, she is not going to use a camera but is playing with a part of her body that indeed should not be watched – a very vulgar and raunchy gesture just emphasized the blasphemous nature of the image she has arranged, as the drunken dossers stand in a perfect replica of one of the holiest pictures of the Christian culture, the Last Supper.
The masters come back earlier than planned. The poor scamper away but Jorge is punched while Viridiana is sexually assaulted. In the final scene, some time later, a still-shocked Viridiana, walking and looking around in a haze knocks at the door of Jorge’s bedroom as he was spending his time with Ramona. He invites her to stay with them and sets about learning her card games. The camera tracks out as the trio starts playing cards, seemingly behaving as a quiet little family trying to pass time, though Jorge’s bantering meets only the worried looks of his mistress and the perfunctory gestures of his dumbstruck cousin.
Viridiana was right: she should not have left the convent. The tranquil, sun-lit, routine-shaped, perfectly-choreographed shots of the beginning would never be matched in the rest of the film. The outer world is definitely messier and darker. The determined and radiant novice ends up being an idiot – she is barely able to think and has probably faith and hope, condoning to an extra-marital, socially unseemly affair before, perhaps, be part of it, as much as she was supposed to be just the sexual fantasy of her uncle. The eye of the camera has quickly warned us: a woman is always an object of desire.
But it is even more pessimistic. If the wealthy are morally corrupt the poor cannot be redeemed from their base instincts and attitudes. The drunken bunch fooling about in the dining room have just fulfilled their wish of good food and their taste of luxury, letting naturally their wildest and coarsest instincts prevail as they get fun – they perhaps have no idea that their fake group portrait is a copy of the Last Supper, though the director is fully aware of how it is building up to be one; but his provocative and subversive gesture expresses above all a scathing and depressing statement: the poor cannot be the model praised by the Christian message whose charity is irrelevant because of what the human nature really is.
And this human nature is stirred by freakish, cruel impulses, often linked to lust – twice rape is attempted on Viridiana’s body. Viridiana is not impervious to those darker forces, as suggested by her sleepwalking. Innocence does not belong to this world. Tellingly, a mundane child toy becomes a tool of horror – the jump rope is as useful to have fun as to carry out grisly acts (it is used for a suicide but also by a poor as he tries to rape Viridiana). Conversely, the precious wreath of thorns Viridiana holds so dear ends up stoking a bonfire (it is Ramona’s daughter who throws the object in the flames; earlier she has been cast as a thoroughly bad-mannered kid; so the film makes clear that even a child cannot be touched by innocence and decency).
The morale, as suggested by the final shot, is that is inevitable to let people live with their instincts – unless you think another kind of moral coercion can be used to behave them. Luis Buñuel has claimed that he is a communist, and of the Stalinist kind moreover, because only such a violent ideological dictatorship could force people to change. He does not see them as benevolent creatures and obviously despises the Christian views on changing minds. That explains a lot in this film which nicely balances clarity of narration with his Surrealist imagery– and that obviously ran contrary to the worldview of the regime ruling Spain in 1962. The film should have signaled the return of the prodigal son to his native land – but it caused such a scandal that is was censored there and Buñuel moved back to Mexico, where he had been in exile, to shoot his next film, probably smirking at the callous but brilliant satire he threw at his fellow countrymen’s faces.