Word: tristana
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...Tristana. Like their greatest paisano, Picasso, Spanish geniuses have their roots in another century or their homes in another country. Except for that grand exception: Luis Buñuel. The Old Aragonese, 70, has reached a modus vivendi with Franco Spain, and returned to create in Tristana a coda of inexhaustible power and sophistication. Like the world reflected in a convex mirror, every element is in this masterwork -but somehow transfigured and amplified. People are themselves and something other. Even the film's title has a dual meaning: Tristana suggests "sadness," and is the name of its heroine, impeccably...
Then, with scarcely a pause, he began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Buñuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin...
...Both of his sons dabble in the arts, Raphael as a sculptor, Juan Luis as an experimental-film maker. This fall, the old man returned to his motherland once more, where, again, he is working on his "last" film. Under the sullen skies of Toledo, he directs scenes from Tristana, a dissection of Spanish middle-class society. One scene is purest Buñueliana: a crumpled, baggy-eyed Catherine Deneuve sits in a wheelchair, munching empty ice cream cones. Pushing the wheelchair is a deaf-mute with a demented stare, while from a park bench a large woman breast-feeding...
...weary and almost completely deaf, Buñuel moves like a pained penguin, as if he feels every second of his 69 years. Yet like his countryman Picasso, his large, intense eyes seem illuminated from inside by some unquenchable zeal. No one knows whether Tristana will indeed be his finale or whether Luis Buñuel is trying to propitiate fate by loudly leaving art before reality quietly leaves him. If there is any certainty about the enigmatic old film maker, it was recently voiced by New Wave Director Louis Malle: "Buñuel will die with the director...