Viridiana (1961)

Viridiana (1961) - (Spain /Mexico)

Co-written and directed by Luis Buñuel

*SPOILER FREE

"An orgy that makes the orgy in 'La Dolce Vita' look like a family picnic".

Viridiana is a drama following a young nun, Viridiana, who's about to take her final vows at a Spanish covenant. She pays a visit to her widowed uncle in the countryside where her life will take a slightly different path from what she had planned.

This is a tale about humans, their righteousness and their wickedness, about guilt and virtue, this a chaotic look-over at rape, incest, necrophilia, animal cruelty and sacrilege through the lens of art.

Luis Buñuel, the Spanish-Mexican revolutionary filmmaker and godfather of surreal cinema, composes a emotional motion picture of satire and dramady, a comic and daring poem of reality and modernity.

Buñuel had played hide-and-seek with the Spanish authorities and censorship, mischievously accommodating their demands for changing the film's final scene due to its "immorality" with "even more immoral", as was later to observe.

While being stoned from every direction by the European church and shocking some audiences, others praised it and called the greatest Spanish film of all time.

After renouncing his Spanish nationality to become a Mexican citizen at the age of 50, Viridiana marks Luis Buñuel's - now 60 - return to international cinema after which he would carry on making a cinematic masterpiece after another until the last days of his legendary career in the late 1970s, to which I pay my tribute as an entire-filmography recommendation.

Viridiana is an unorthodox examination of art, religion, and society, a beautiful work of art and a masterpiece of world cinema.

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Available to watch on The Criterion Collection and Amazon Prime Video

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