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***/****
Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+ starring Catherine
Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero, Lola Gaos screenplay
by Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Julio Alejandro, based on the novel
by Benito Pérez Galdós directed
by Luis Buñuel
by
Angelo Muredda You might not think it from overdetermined
schlock like Simon
Birch, but disability is a tough trope to wrangle, an
errant bodily signifier that doesn't always play nice. Just think of Million Dollar Baby,
which tries and fails to use Hilary Swank's
impairment as a
narrative shortcut for Clint Eastwood's transformation into a tender
father,
troubled Catholic, and euthanizer-turned-agent of transcendence all at
once.
Eastwood the director has to stumble over the mechanics of his scene
partner's
newly-maimed body and horizontal status, fudging the timeline so that
her
bedsores appear to sprout within minutes of her injury and puzzling over
how to
frame her, whether as a head poking out of a hospital bed in the
background or
a wheelchair-sporting cyborg parked in dead centre, staring out her
hospital
window like a forlorn puppy. That representational awkwardness is so
common that
in disability studies, it even has a name: Ato Quayson calls it
"aesthetic
nervousness," meaning a text's tendency to collapse in a fit of nerves
before the matter of how to represent a disabled body.
RUNNING TIME
99 minutes MPAA
PG-13 ASPECT
RATIO(S)
1.66:1 (1080p/MPEG-4) LANGUAGES Spanish 5.1 DTS-HD MA
English 5.1 DTS-HD MA SUBTITLES
English REGION
A DISC
TYPE
BD-50 STUDIO
Cohen
Aesthetic nervousness is often the sort of
thing one comes down with, like a cold, but it brings a wild jolt to Tristana,
which, prior to its amputation-inspired last act, is in
danger of
becoming a slick late-life career sampler for then-70-year-old Luis
Buñuel. A
long-in-the-works adaptation of the eponymous novel by Spanish realist
Benito
Pérez Galdós, whose work also inspired Viridiana, Tristana opens with the titular 19-year-old orphan (an especially
luminous
Catherine Deneuve) adopted by dissipated nobleman Don Lope (Fernando
Rey), who
preaches that those in power must defend the weak at all costs only to promptly
treat his new child bride like a servant. As surrogate fathers go, Don
Lope is
mostly heavy-handed, restricting Tristana's outdoor privileges and
forcing her
to listen to his confused Marxist rhetoric, sermons that end in him
celebrating
his
layabout status while endorsing the ennobling quality of hard labour. His
less than paternal instincts towards Tristana, who at first seems
oblivious to
his sexualization of her and then only slightly less so ("I wish he
loved
me a little less," she muses), nudge her into the arms of rakish
painter
Horacio (Franco Nero), where she stays until a sudden illness calls her
back to
her subordinate position under the older man, whose all-consuming
passion and
doting is even more insufferable now that she's immobile.
Tristana's
thematics are no stretch for Buñuel, for whom
battles of the
sexes, women in bloom, and religious hypocrisy were nothing new at this
point.
But as with Don Lope, who's all too happy to cheer on the future as
long as he
gets to keep his status, there's something affable about Buñuel's
facility with
his pet motifs, not to mention our recognition of the steadiness behind
surrealist
flourishes like Tristana's dream of the patriarch's severed head
swinging like
a bell clapper. There's comfort in such signatures, and in Buñuel's
offhand mastery of both form and text in his fluid staging of drawing-room
conversations, the camera pivoting around the table to properly linger
on each
speaker. That unfussy style is nicely keyed into dialogue best
described as barely funny, as when a passing couple is summarily
dismissed
for their "bovine air of resignation."
While all of this is fine, albeit minor,
the film never really gets its legs until the heroine loses hers. The
fun has
little do with surprise, given that Tristana's corporeal justice for
transgressing with the younger man–via a tumour that grows
just as
she's coming into her more cosmopolitan self–is telegraphed by Don
Lope's eerie
pronouncement that "If you want to keep a woman honest, you must break
her
legs and keep her home." Yet the flagrantly bad taste of the
denouement,
which trades in tired Renaissance tropes about the one-to-one
correspondence of
a beautiful body and a beautiful soul (even as it ironizes them),
activates a
grotesque playfulness amidst all this strained politeness. After her
operation,
Buñuel roves under the piano to find his leading lady's stump, a
self-implicating rhyme of an earlier moment where a deaf young man tries
to lift
up her skirt and is gently admonished. Even more evocative: an image of
Tristana's garments casually strewn about the artificial leg
lying on
her bed–the most significant disclosure of Deneuve's status as a sex
symbol granted
via a prosthetic that's effectively standing (or lying down) for her.
Towards
the end, when Tristana's transformation from woman in a refrigerator to
vengeful goddess is near complete, Don Lope revels in her dependence on
him,
offering that she's arguably "more attractive now, for a lot of
people." Her answer, that it "takes all kinds," is a wonderfully-timed
joke, yet it's also a smart take on Buñuel's own primal interest
in the
power of a disabled body to disarm and throw the basic tenets of
representation
into disarray.
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
Cohen Media Group brings Tristana to Blu-ray in a 1080p transfer pillarboxed at 1.66:1. The new restoration is
remarkably
strong, considering it's apparently a Frankenstein cobbled from numerous sources. Print
damage
is minimal, brief flashes of colour, like the royal blue on a few boys'
uniforms or the deep red of a shawl, are vivid, and detail is fine. This is a
muted
presentation overall, but faithfully so, given how the stodginess of
Don Lope's
world tends to extend to his home's earthy palette as well as
Tristana's
brownish wardrobe. The 5.1 DTS HD Master Audio tracks in Spanish and
English
are equally erviceable. Deneuve and Nero recorded their dialogue in
French and
Italian, respectively, so their voices are a bit off, but dialogue is crisp and
the
Chopin sure sounds nice. This is a tasteful remix where the 5.1 is
mainly used
to anchor the centre channel and increase fidelity.
Some compelling supplementary material helps position Cohen Film Collection as a worthy
companion
to the Criterion Collection, particularly for scholars and cinephiles
with a
historicist bent. The commentary track consists of an informal
conversation
between Deneuve and critic Kent Jones, who wisely gets out of the way
in
soliciting stories from the grand dame. Though their chat features a lot of
good
anecdotes about her working experience with directors like Roman
Polanski,
Peter William Evans's audiovisual lecture from an empty
theatre, "Luis Buñuel's Tristana: Repression and Desire" (32 mins., HD), goes
a bit deeper. He elucidates much of the film's political context and
Freudian
content while positioning both within a thematic reading focused on
Buñuel's
fraught depiction of freedom and the role of women in 1920s Spain.
There's also
a one-minute alternate ending (in HD), though the one in the film proper strikes
me as
punchier. Rounding things out are a pair of trailers–one for the
restoration, the other a French theatrical promo–plus a substantial booklet. The latter contains a recent essay on Tristana's sly subversiveness from CINEASTE editor
Richard Porton, a more old-fashioned excerpt
from Raymond Durgnat's 1977 book on Buñuel, and snippets from Deneuve's
production diary, full of glorious nuggets like the following
observation of Nero: "Hard for a Latin man to fully accept the actor's
position in life." Poor guy.
