The Criterion Blogathon: Viridiana

Luis Buñuel's late career has been described as one of the great artistic flowerings in cinema. Starting in (roughly) 1961, the conventional wisdom suggests, Buñuel began making masterpieces as a matter of course. I'm not entirely sympathetic with this point of view. By the time he made Viridiana (1961), he had already made Los Olvidados and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz. It is, perhaps, more correct to say that after 1961, the world noticed that Bunuel was making masterpieces whenever he was given his head. The revival of his reputation occurred, perhaps, because he was no longer working in the ignored cinematic backwater of Mexico. The film cognoscenti can be Eurocentric, sometimes, especially the French. Even two years before Viridiana, French critics were wondering what had happened to Buñuel after the promising start to his career. And then Viridiana happened and Buñuel's fortunes changed. Even if one accepts that Buñuel's late flowering is an illusion or a trick of one's point of view, Viridiana remains a film upon which his career seems to turn.

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Speak of the Devil

Before it flies off the rails at the end, Here Comes the Devil (2013, directed by Adrián García Bogliano) builds a formidable ambiance of dread. It's mostly a slow burner, in which the intellectual implications of its set-up are more horrible than any monsters, though in the end, it supplies monsters. Maybe. It's an ambiguous, sometimes perplexing movie.

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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

I often don't know how to react to nunsploitation movies. Apart from the feminist and queer-activist objections that I might raise about the exploitation elements in nunsploitation, I'm perhaps more deeply conflicted by the religious implications. Depending on who's behind the camera, these films either indulge in anti-religious straw-manning or they function as religious propaganda. Sometimes, they'll do both within the same damned movie. Alucarda (1977, directed by Juan López Moctezuma), a key nunsploitation film from Mexico, makes no pretense of a coherent theological critique or even a coherent story, though I think it mostly functions on the religious propaganda side of the equation.

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Mothers and Sons

Club Sandwich (2013, directed by Fernando Eimbcke) is a coming of age story with an unusual point of view. Its young protagonist is a bundle of sexual confusion, as most such protagonists are. You've seen countless boys like him fumbling their way toward adulthood. In a male-dominated industry, these kinds of stories proliferate. What you generally don't see is the effect this has on the protagonist's parent(s). This film's primary insight is to look at what a mother might feel while watching her son discover his sexuality. That the film is quietly funny is a bonus. It's not glib, though, and it's doesn't take shortcuts. The slow accumulation of awkward moments becomes heavy over the course of the film and its ultimate disposition is more bittersweet than comedic. It's a good comedy that can reveal its characters without mocking or humiliating them. This manages to do exactly that.

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Duplication Errors

Call it the Psycho dilemma: The danger that, when closely remaking a given film, you will miss some animating ka that gave the earlier film life. Gus Van Sant's Psycho is almost (though not quite) a frame for frame recreation of Hitchcock's film, but there's some spark of life that's missing. It's a film that sits dead on the screen. It's a bit like the kid in Pet Semetary. He looks like the living kid, but he's dead inside, and worse. He's possessed of something rancid and awful. Another such film is last year's Come Out and Play (2012, directed by Makinov), an ill-advised remake of Who Can Kill a Child? In both it's broad outlines and in its particulars, this is the same damned movie. Like Vince Vaughn's Norman Bates and the kid in Pet Semetary, something has been lost and replaced by something...wrong.

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No Country for Young Women

Miss Bala (2011, directed by Gerardo Naranjo) was Mexico's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars last year. It didn't make the short list, but there's no shame in that. It certainly deserved to be in the conversation. It's a harrowing movie. From my perspective, it's a movie that functions as a kind of distaff answer to Cormac McCarthy's border novels. McCarthy, famously, is uncomfortable writing about women. This movie places its heroine square in the center of a story that bears more than a passing resemblance to No Country for Old Men, minus the old men. There's a withering gaze at the role of women in Mexican society too, and that has an echo in McCarthy as well, given that he once placed an idealized woman in the center of a Mexican patriarchy in All the Pretty Horses and used her as the crucible in which to test his hero. It certainly wasn't about her. Women are phantasms for McCarthy:

"The last time that he saw her before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect out of a rainsquall building to the north and the dark clouds towering above her. She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal. "

The heroine in Miss Bala suggests that this is so much bullshit. As well she should.

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