"Nazarín"
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I managed to watch the last half of Luis Buñuel's
"Los Olvidados" and all of "Nazarín" last night. I first saw "Los Olvidados" in the early 1960s and had the same
reaction to it last night as I did originally. It is a totally unsentimental
vision of people living in poverty. Although Buñuel
clearly hates the social system that breeds the kind of feral youth depicted in
the film, there is not even a glimmer of hope it can be changed.
"Nazarín" is the only Buñuel film I had never seen before. It combines a lot of
the elements found in his other works: religious obsession, sexual repression
and scabrous behavior among the lower classes. Like "Los Olvidados," it was filmed in
"Nazarín" is the story
of a Catholic priest who lives among the poor and takes Jesus's
teachings literally. He is always turning the other cheek, even when local
prostitutes steal the bread from his meager table. His uncompromising beliefs
are seen as crazy not only by his lumpen neighbors
but by the Catholic hierarchy which disowns him after he gives shelter to a
prostitute injured in a knife fight.
Driven from his slum neighborhood, Nazarín
goes on a pilgrimage in the Mexican countryside (the film is set in the early
1900s and is based on a novel by the Spanish author Benito Perez-Galdos) where he is pursued by two prostitutes, including
the one who was stabbed. They are convinced that he is a new Christ and follow
him blindly, despite his constant pleas to be left alone. In a quintessentially
Buñuelian scene, the priest offers some prayers to a
gravely ill young girl while his two disciples and other village women perform
what amounts to an exorcism in the bedroom. One rolls
around on the floor as possessed by the devil; another strokes the priest with
a clump of leaves she understands to have healing powers. He can barely contain
his disgust with their behavior. Only God and science can heal the young girl,
he says, giving no indication that he understands that the two things are in
conflict.
When the girl wakes up the next morning free of her fever,
his two female disciples are more convinced than ever of his Christ-like
powers. They follow him from village to village expecting miracles, but they
experience nothing but grief as the villagers prey upon his guilelessness.
Although the film is about the dubiousness of deep spirituality, it will also
remind you of Don Quixote, another picaresque tale of the clash between
idealism and reality.
About this film Buñuel has said,
"I am very much attached to Nazarín. He is a
priest. He could as well be a hairdresser or a waiter. What interests me about
him is that he stands by his ideas, that these ideas are unacceptable to
society at large, and that after his adventures with prostitutes, thieves and
so forth, they lead him to being irrevocably damned by the prevailing social
order."
Of course, you could say the same thing about socialists
whose morality clashes with society at large and who are often viewed as
Quixotic at best. Buñuel was one of the great radical
film-makers of the 20th century. His earliest film was "Land Without Bread," a documentary about poverty in rural Extremadura. Like other radicals, Buñuel
was also drawn to surrealism and even worked with Salvador Dali for a time.
Unlike Dali, Buñuel had no use for fascism and left
Buñuel died in 1983 at the age of
83. With the disappearance of film revival theaters in NYC and other large
cities, especially foreign films of the 40s and 50s, your only recourse is to
rent them from local stores or on the Internet. Even though "Nazarín" is listed as being available in VHS according
to imdb.com, I have never seen it on the shelves. It is very much to the credit
of Turner Classic Movies (TCM) that they are showing such films. Ted Turner
gained some notoriety when he made the dubious decision to colorize
black-and-white films, often to a jarring effect. There is nothing worse than
watching some 1930s noir and seeing Humphrey Bogart or Edward G. Robinson's face
in an almost neon peach glow. As far as I can tell, TCM has abandoned this
practice.