Word: viridiana
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Surprisingly, the film was actually made in Spain. Bunuel is an anarchist, but he is also the most famous Spanish moviemaker, so Franco invited him to come home after 25 years in exile and to shoot a picture with government funds. Bunuel accepted the offer, shot Viridiana. But before Franco's censors could take a whack at it, he smuggled the film out of the country. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it won the Grand Prize...
...Viridiana tells the story of a novice (Silvia Final) who visits her sole surviving relative (Fernando Rey), an uncle in late middle age, before taking her final vows...
...quixotic solitary, indolent in the grand Spanish manner; he secretly preens himself in corsets worn many years before by his wife, who died on their wedding day. One night the uncle persuades Viridiana to wear his wife's wedding dress...
...estate falls partly to Viridiana, partly to Jorge, the uncle's practical, unprincipled, illegitimate son. Jorge works hard to make his half of the hacienda a paying proposition. Viridiana turns her half into a refuge for the rag, tag and bobtail of the province-beggars, footpads, lepers, trulls. While Jorge and his hired men work, Viridiana and her rabble pray...
...while both Jorge and Viridiana are away from home, the lower orders rise up and breach the walls of privilege. Eager as rats they scatter through the house, squeaking and plundering, happy as fiends with a rich man's soul. Out come the linens and the candelabra, the rare wines, the cates and dainties, a whole lamb. Like dukes the poor pilgarlics sit them down to a palatial feast that rapidly degenerates into a gutter brawl. But the brawl is intended also as a rite, as the dissolution of a desiccated society in a Dionysian mystery. In the depths...