Viridiana

In 1960, after an exile of more than two decades, Luis Buñuel was invited back to his native Spain to direct a film. The result was the scandalous Viridiana, one of the surrealist director’s great masterpieces, a film made with the full cooperation of Franco’s fascist regime, which only too late recognized its subversive nature. The government’s attempts to suppress the movie failed; prints of Viridiana reached Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or as best film — the first Spanish film so honoured. Sylvia Pinal is featured in the title role as the beautiful young nun who pays a visit to her widowed uncle (Fernando Rey), only to discover that his feelings for her go beyond the avuncular, and his sexual predilections run to the bizarre. Among the film’s outrages: a grotesque parody of da Vinci’s The Last Supper that ranks amongst the most celebrated — and most sacrilegious — sequences in the Buñuel canon. The Vatican denounced Viridiana as an insult to Christianity; Buñuel, who considered it his most personal film since L’Age d’Or, replied: "I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am." "Arguably Buñuel’s greatest provocation" (Time Out New York). B&W, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 90 mins.