SYNOPSICS
Tristana (1970) is a Spanish movie. Luis Buñuel has directed this movie. Catherine Deneuve,Fernando Rey,Franco Nero,Lola Gaos are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1970. Tristana (1970) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
When the young woman Tristana's mother dies, she is entrusted to the guardianship of the well-respected though old Don Lope. Don Lope is well-liked and well-known because of his honorable nature, despite his socialistic views about business and religion. But Don Lope's one weakness is women, and he falls for the innocent girl in his charge, seduces her, makes her his lover, though all the while explaining to her that she is as free as he. But when she acts on this freedom, Don Lope must deal with the consequences of his world-view.
Same Actors
Tristana (1970) Reviews
Brilliant film illustrating power struggles
I don't want to talk too much about the style of the film, as other comments do this fairly well. However to briefly surmise them: there is no non-diegetic music, it is in colour but grainy (looks good, don't let this put you off), contains surrealist imagery as do all of Bunuel's films, and the lighting and the cinematography are sublime. I can rave about the brilliance of the technical aspects of the film, but to some it is the story content and themes that are the main focus, so I will talk about this. The film sees a young orphan taken in by one of her mother's past lovers. Played by Fernando Rey, very well I might add - though this is an understatement. Catherine Deneuve plays the title character to perfection. The orphan becomes both the 'daughter' and lover of Don Lope, Rey's character, and it is the change in power from Don Lope to Tristana that is one of the central themes of the film. In order for Tristana to get freedom she must pay the price of losing her innocence. Bunuel uses many scenes to show this, such as the balcony scene where Tristana reveals her naked self to her watchful deaf mute servant and childhood friend Saturno. Bunuel also edits this shot with an extended shot of the virgin Mary, and the comparisons are obvious. The film is very enjoyable, yet still deals with issues such as sexual freedom, power, anti-clericism and anti-bourgeois values amongst others. The film is not Bunuel's most surreal work, however it still contains the themes and images typical of him. The acting is brilliant, no more so than the leads of Deneuve and Rey. Tristana could be seen as the sister of Severine in Belle De Jour, also played by Deneuve. Certainly worthy of being in the top ten films of all time. Brilliant!
Great Bunuel
I can't say I know Luis Bunuel's style well, since I've not seen many of his works, and those that I've seen usually just struck me as blah. But then yesterday I saw Tristana which starred Catherine Deneuve and was awe-struck by it. See, the comments that I've read online about it have seem to have the focus all wrong, they are more interested in commenting on Bunuel's usual attack on the bourgeois and catholicism. Yes it is dark and in some places rather surreal, but above all, Tristana is a simple and sad story about its characters as they grapple with life, love, loss and regret. It is especially well-crafted with its sinewed study of human relationships, and humans that desperately try to relate with each other. Tristana, played brilliantly by Catherine Denueve, is the central character whom we see evolve from an innocent young girl with her many ideals about love and relationship, to a bitter and cynical woman at the film's end who cannot believe in anything any longer. It is with special finesse that Deneuve plays her, that we witness, with heartbreak, every turn of her back on the things she love, and every rejection of all morality that she held before. Fernando Rey's character is probably the murkiest but ultimately most empathetic character, as at the end of the film, age wears off his hard-edged cynicism and turns him into the loving father figure that Tristana desperately needed in the beginning of the film. In a sense, it is a film about age, how when we reach a certain point in our lives we see things much clearer and as it is, rather than try to twist things to our advantage. The way Rey's character treasures the time with the vile and vindictive Tristana at the end of the film is not only overwhelmingly sad, but also an epiphany by an auteur who is gaining age himself. In spite of all its dramatic turns of events, Tristana is not an emotional and angsty film in its portrayal of its characters' lives. Instead it is a soft and peaceful film that sympathetically accepts its characters' flaws as much as it forgives them. It is a film that evokes the intricate feeling of looking back in our dark and troubled past and finding the exquisite moments of happiness amidst all the cynicism and grit. When, towards the end, Rey reaches the peace that he has been struggling so hard to attain throughout the film, he notes, 'It's snowing so hard outside, but in this house, I'm nice and warm. What's there not to be happy about?'. A silent recognition that peace is not bending reality to your own will, but merely, acceptance.
The bell clapper.
It was the second time Bunuel had directed Deneuve and she was probably never better than when she was directed by the master. Like Juan Bardem's unfairly forgotten "calle mayor" ,"Tristana depicts a small Spanish town still entangled in religion.But the times are changing.Don Lope (Rey) has become an hedonist and he tells us that it's Mosis who made sex a sin.Tristana is his ward,but as she confesses it to the painter,"I'm his daughter and his wife" . Tristana is perhaps Bunuel's most complex woman.The physical metamorphosis of Deneuve is stunning.From the virgin who puts her hair in braids to the bitchy one-legged woman ,she runs the whole gamut.She refuses marriage because it kills love,and when she finally becomes Lope's wife,she uses it as a way of humiliating and frustrating her old husband whom she despises .The noise in the corridor as Tristana walks on her crutches while Lope is sipping hot chocolate with his friends (priests) shows frustration as nobody but Bunuel can. The dream,(Rey as a bell clapper),which will remain "Tristana"'s most famous scene, will puzzle the audience.The first time it had appeared ,I did not think at all it was a dream.Bunuel will take this technique to its absolute limits in "discreet charm of the bourgeoisie",his following work . We find back some of Bunuel's permanent features in "Tristana" :Lope,full of jealousy and locking up his ward, is a distant cousin of the hero of "El" ;the deaf and dumb boy ,some kind of brother of Maria in "la mort en ce jardin";The old man who sees his youth slip away was already in "Viridiana" (Fernando Rey again);fetishism ;exhibitionism :in a memorable scene,Tristana ,who refuses to give herself to her future husband (the wedding scene follows the exhibitionist one)shows her magnificent body to the deaf and dumb boy,an outcast,the scum of the earth ,derisively. Recommended,as anything Bunuel did.
melodrama lifted up into perverse tragedy as only Bunuel can do
It might appear to the uninitiated that Luis Bunuel is making with Tristana at first a good but very predictable melodrama that turns somewhere in the second half mark into a strange power-play of desire turned on its head. But in reality, when looking at it after seeing a couple of his films, Bunuel's work with Tristana is somehow kind of touching. He cares about all of his characters- none of whom what they seem or dumbed down to Lifetime movie levels- and in this stuck-in-its-ways society there are boundaries that are crossed in tragic means. Usually one might expect some dark or subtle comedy of manners or satire on society, but here it's stripped away, as it was for some of Viridiana, and all that's left is a spare, tense and expertly manipulated tale where the tables are turned once or twice on the couple of Don Lope (Fernando Rey) and Tristana (Catherine Deneauve, maybe her most physically demanding of her two Bunuel roles). One thing that's extraordinary about how Bunuel directs and allows for his actors to play the scenes is that the emotions are only heightened to a certain level, and never with the aid of things like music or tears. It is what it is: Don Lope has taken care of Tristana as her guardian since her mother died, and now has inserted himself as her father/husband figure, with his servant Saturna (stern-faced but understanding Lola Gaos) a kind of unofficial confessional. Tristana wants some freedom, just to go out and walk around, and feels caught by Don Lope even when not doing anything... until she meets Franco Nero's Don Horacio, a painter who could promise a new life. This goes without saying that one should take it for granted that Tristana isn't *that* young and could take care of herself without Lope, but maybe this is part of the point of the slight absurdity- and eventual tragedy- of this struggle. Two years go by after she leaves Lope for Horacio, with a tumor in her leg. She's now a cripple, and now once again a kind of mental prisoner in Lope's home; the complexity of old man Lope as being duplicitous is seen right after he finds out she's sick and Horacio asks for Lope to help keep her home, and he nearly skips home saying "she'll never leave again!" All of this, leading up to a final twist that is very satisfying if extending the tragic dimension of Lope and Tristana, would be soapy and tawdry and, possibly, very standard in other hands. For Bunuel, there's a lot of personal ground here; I wonder at times if Rey is a little like one of those actors a director of Bunuel's auteur-stature uses as a means of expressing himself through an actor, or if it's just because he's so good at playing wicked AND sympathetic bourgeois. And the mixture of ideas, if not really themes, covering what's love and over-control, religion, deformity, a free will are potent and exciting even in such subtle and (as Maltin said) serenely filmed territory. It's also a minor triumph for Deneuve, who between this and Belle de jour did some of her best work as an actress for the notorious surrealist. Her character's continual dream of Lope's beheaded top dangling from a church tower is the closest we see to a classic surrealist scene, though it's reminiscent of Los Olvidados as brilliantly expressing one character's mind-set. Deneuve is up for the challenge of putting up a tough interior and exterior presence; she gets paler towards the end (if this was for real or just a bad print I couldn't tell), and there's a lot of pain in her eyes and expression throughout. It's great work for one of the director's most subtly demanding works- beneath its conventional framework of a love-triangle story is sorrow and horror at the human condition.
A Love/ Hate Movie.
One of the better melodramas by Bunuel that stars Catherine Deneuve --Belle De Jour was the most successful. Tristana is the third installment to Bunuel's ill-fated heroine yarn: as we know, Viridiana and Belle De Jour were the first 2. Nevertheless, the film's not as surreal as these previous two films; however, Bunuel still maintains his use of dream sequences and familiar motifs. Rey is excellent as the lecherous uncle, and Deneuve is also good as the title character. Bunuel has definitely excelled in focusing on the aesthetic approach to a story-line; however, this respect can be overwhelming for some viewers, especially those who are more comfortable with the fast-paced American movies. In short, Tristana is still an excellent movie regardless of these unusual aspects.