Rating: NNNNN
VIRIDIANA (Luis Buuel) is the definitive out-of-nowhere classic. When Viridiana debuted late during the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, Buuel was locked solidly in the “whatever happened to?” category. He’d followed up his early, groundbreaking surrealist classics with more than a decade labouring — fruitfully, as it happened — in the backwater of Mexican cinema. Nobody expected him to show up with a succès de scandale and a Palme d’Or winner. Viridiana (Silvia Pinal), a novice nun, returns home to visit her uncle and winds up inheriting the estate. She decides to spend her time caring for local beggars who are the living definition of what Shaw called the undeserving poor. Critics have burned a lot of incense to Buuel’s surrealism and anticlericalism, but almost no one points out how flat-out weird his movies are, including official classics like Viridiana. Buuel offers a surgically precise visual style, a peculiarly sadistic treatment of character and jokes that seem to drop from the sky. This one truly lives up to Cinematheque’s description of this series as “essentials” of world cinema. NNNNN (August 4, Cinema-theque Ontario)
