Viridiana (1961)

One wonders just what Francisco Franco and the leaders of his regime were thinking when they invited arch surrealist and stubborn anti-Fascist Luis Buñuel back to the land of his birth to make Viridiana. Buñuel had made a career out of confronting his audiences and defying creative authority, and anyone who imagined that he had meekly begun sleeping with the enemy was in for a shock. Viridiana was a gleefully blasphemous tirade against Catholicism and the Spanish bourgeoisie that proved something of an embarrassment to Spain despite winning top honors at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Fernando Rey, one of Buñuel's favorite actors in his late period, is deliciously sleazy yet refined as Don Jaime; Rey's easy charm and understated wit are the perfect match for the elegantly corrupt man whose sense of propriety does not rule out drugging and seducing his niece, who happens to be a nun. Silvia Pinal's performance as Viridiana often suggests that she isn't entirely in on the joke, but the distance works in her favor, as the young novitiate seems blissfully unaware first of her uncle's designs upon her, and later of the contempt that the beggars and street people she tries to help feel for her. The final scene -- in which the beggars freeze into a recreation of The Last Supper as a filthy woman "photographs" them by lifting her skirts -- is, along with Simon of the Desert, one of Buñuel's strongest and funniest anti-clerical moments. Like the best of Buñuel's work, Viridiana is smart, witty, deeply cutting, and thoroughly uncompromised, a fitting bit of revenge from an old Loyalist against the dictator who defeated him. Buñuel would have the last laugh yet again when he returned to Spain nine years later to make Tristana, a fitting companion piece to Viridiana. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide