Viridiana (1961). After years of exile, Buñuel was allowed to return to his native country to direct the piercing satire Viridiana, a masterful film that only succeeded in getting him kicked out of Spain again. Ironically, however, despite its reception and Buñuel’s own irreligious objective, Viridiana, with its emphasis on human wickedness and depravity, is in many ways actually one of the most effective Catholic films of all time. Viridiana also finally signaled Buñuel’s maturity as an artist and set the pattern for his later work, including Simon of the Desert, a bizarre satire of religion, and the great, taboo shattering Belle de Jour. A.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974). If Buñuel discovered his path with the great Viridiana, his subsequent films became increasingly indistinguishable. While his grasp on the language of cinema prevented boredom, he essentially reworked the same themes with varying degrees of success; his humor, which once so fervently avoided the conventional, became predictable. This is not true for The Phantom of Liberty, where Buñuel’s id runs free in an outrageous confection of tangentially related vignettes. Some of the scenes drag, and the film as a whole suffers from Buñuel’s occasionally tiresome mockery of religion and the bourgeoisie, but Buñuel’s antipathy for logical progression creates a dizzying, unpredictable text full of possibility and surprise. B.
