Tristana

Fernando Rey always seems to be the perfect choice to play the alter-ego of his director, Luis Bunuel (as Mastroianni was to Fellini). In this case he plays an aging aristocrat who seems to be a mess of contradictions -- a bourgeois socialist, a devout atheist who makes his company with priests, and a moralist who has no qualms with seducing women. When her mother dies, Rey's character becomes the guardian to the ever lovely Catherine Deneuve, and he quickly develops a perverse relationship with her that varies between father and lover. He steals her innocence and later in life, she hates him for it with a vengeance. While it may lack the wit and gleeful surrealism (with the exception of Rey's reoccuring dream of his severed head being used to ring the church bell) of Bunuel's finest films during the 70's, I am never let away from the thought that I am watching an intensely personal film. Typical Bunuel themes such as the sexual domination of a younger woman by an older man would be much more disturbing had he not injected his images with the fragments of his own tortured soul.