Cinema: Garlic and Sapphires

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The New York Film Festival is a peculiar combination of international no-talents and geniuses, a show, in T.S. Eliot's phrase, of "garlic and sapphires in the mud." Last week, at its opening, the garlic was very much in evidence. This week some sapphires glint:

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 played by Catherine Deneuve.

Tristana is the ward of a graying voluptuary, Don Lope (Fernando Key). Lope is an aristocrat, an atheist and a hypocrite—three distinct personalities that Rey manages to portray simultaneously. As his money and his vigor recede, Don Lope pursues the bewildered girl and overtakes her. Once seduced, Tristana is a figure of metastasizing vengeance. When she becomes the mistress of a young artist (Franco Nero), Don Lope shouts in misery, "I prefer tragedy to ridicule . . ." The girl awards him both. Her flight with the artist is ended by a disease that costs her a leg. Convalescing in the house of her for mer guardian, Tristana hears Lope, stricken with a heart attack, rattling in his bed. She starts to call a doctor, then lowers the phone to its cradle . . .

The classic elements of youth and age, jealousy and revenge may seem better suited to opera than to modern film. But Buñuel recognizes no visual or emotional barriers. His scenario seems, rhythmically, to have been composed on the guitar. It traverses wit and melancholy, surrealism and truth without missing a quarter note.

Much of Tristana's success lies in the director's scrupulous ambition. Once he was satisfied with the village atheism of Nazarin or the facile eroticism of Belle de Jour. In his 29th film, he is content with nothing less than the face of Spain. Don Lope's backchat with his comrades is an indelible vignette of the inhuman condition, where the aging pick the reputations of their fallen comrades, like buzzards wheeling over cadavers. In the background hover the symbolic figures of deaf-mutes, youths whose voices, like many Spaniards', cannot be heard. Yet Tristana is no celluloid editorial. Whatever its impetus, it ends with disguised love. The music of the voices, the soft light, the national tone of resignation illuminate a country of bottomless tradition where even a career anarchist and antichrist like Buñuel must, at last, be overwhelmed by the past.

-Stefan Kanfer