Retrospective: Viridiana/Los Olvidados (Patreon)

My friend Jaime insisted I watch a couple Buñuel movies. So I did.

Viridiana piqued my interest when I heard about it. A young woman abandons her plans to become a nun and creates her own religious order. Those of you who know anything about me will understand why the premise appealed to me. I love a good Catholic trauma story. A spurned Catholic recreating the institution that hurt them is a tale as old as Martin Luther.

Sadly, Viridiana abandons the convent because she's molested by her uncle, and this makes her nonviable to be a nun. This decision is not explored in any sort of depth — and Viridiana is not granted half as much interiority as her abusive uncle. We get a nasty parable about how sexually traumatized women in charge of institutions empower nasty poor people to do violence. Next.

Los Olvidados was similarly misanthropic but more successful and interesting, I thought. Street gang in a Mexico City slum gets torn apart when one of them witnesses another boy killing their friend. You can immediately see Scorsese's love of this movie, but I was struck by how like a Spielberg picture it was. Deep depth of frame, focus on the movements of groups, careful blocking, children in danger.

It's well told - more empathetic than Viridiana, probably because it's not about women. There's some ugly "disabled/non-normative bodies as surrealist motif" stuff which I don't love (and which David Lynch was guilty of — another fan of Buñuel). But the surrealist bits are fun and accentuate the febrile atmosphere of these boys' lives. There's a dream sequence that rivals anything in Twin Peaks. Not my favorite movie, but an easy one to respect.