New DVDs: Tristana and That Obscure Object of Desire
LUIS BUUEL began his career as a filmmaker with a Dadaist determination to shock and outrage. He cast himself as the square-jawed dandy who, at the beginning of his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), impassively draws a straight razor across the eyeball of a compliant young woman without troubling to remove the cigarette from his mouth.
As he wrote in his introduction to the published version of the script (written with Salvador Dal), Buuel was disappointed when instead of fleeing the theater in horror and revulsion, the audience actually adored the film and it became something of a hit. The lesson was not lost on him: by the time he began his series of late masterworks with Belle de Jour in 1967, he had discovered that the true path to subversion passed not through violence and provocation but through calm and lucidity.
In the intervening decades, Buuel had developed a style so rigorously neutral that it became deeply, inimitably personal. The performances are carefully purged of any overtly dramatic emotion. The lighting is almost as bright and even as a television sitcom, banishing any Expressionist shadows. The framing avoids the emotional extre! mes of both intense close-ups and distant long shots, most often settling into a three-quarter-length view of the actors, cut off at the knees, who often stand side by side as if they were facing a theatrical audience.
Vivid colors are avoided, and music is used sparingly if at all. Sound effects are crisp and specific, with ambient noise reduced to a too-perfect silence or a featureless whoosh of street traffic. The cumulative effect is one of preternatural clarity and an oddly tranquil tone exactly the opposite of the gothic effects favored by latter-day Surrealists like David Lynch and Tim Burton. We recognize Buuels films as dreams, because they are too realistic to be real.
Buuels mature style can be experienced at its most pure in Tristana, a 1970 film that has been out of circulation since the days of laser disc but has now returned in a restored print from the Cohen Film Collection. Made in Spain after Belle de Jour became an international art house hit, it is also centered on the innocent, almost angelic beauty of Catherine Deneuve, who begins Tristana as a shy adolescent dressed in black mourning clothes.
The death of Tristanas mother has placed her in the hands of her guardian, Don Lope (Fernando Rey), a gentleman of a certain age who may once have been her mothers lover (Buuels way of suggesting, in the most discreet manner possible, that he may also be Tristanas biological father). A member of the fading Castilian aristocracy of Toledo, Don Lope has developed a set of progressive social ideas (he refuses to set foot in church, and instinctively helps a thief escape the police) while maintaining a seigneurial eye for the ladies an eye that soon turns to his ward.
We must protect the weak, Don Lope tells Tristana, wh! en she as! ks him why he helped the thief to get away. But he is blind to the abuse of power when it is in his own interest, and doesnt hesitate to force Tristana into bed (although Buuel, charmingly prudish in his own manner, never deigns to depict something as vulgar as a sex scene).
Working from an 1892 novel by Benito Prez Galds, Buuel has shifted the action to the 1920s, during the reign of the military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera a sly way of evoking the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, still very much in power when Tristana was made. And power is the central theme of Tristana, as developed through a head-spinning sequence of Buuelian paradoxes.
For Tristana, it turns out, is not helpless. Don Lope may have money and tradition on his side, but she possesses the ultimate biological weapon: the ability to manipulate Don Lopes desire. A meeting with a handsome painter (Franco Nero) awakens her to the possibility of independence, and she runs away from the old man, just as the people of Spain elected a republican government in 1931. But an illness a tumor on her leg forces her to return to the paternalistic protection of Don Lope, who in his senescence has begun donating to police charities and inviting priests over for hot chocolate.
Her cancerous leg is removed and they marry, but Tristana has nothing but contempt for the doddering old fool. The power in the relationship now belongs to her, and in a magnificently chilling scene, she revels in it, opening her robe to reveal her body, even more desirable in its mutilation, to tantalize a mute servant boy. She becomes as cruel as Don Lope ever was perhaps even more so.
A perfect companion piece to Tristana, Buuels final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, from 1977, has also re! turned to! circulation, in a superb Blu-ray transfer from Lionsgate. A more one-sided story of sexual domination (based on the same French novel that inspired Josef von Sternbergs masochistic revel The Devil Is a Woman), it again features Rey as an aging Lothario, who this time is dominated by his obsession with a capricious flamenco dancer. Her unpredictable nature, as a self-proclaimed virgin who repeatedly leads him on and then refuses him, is wittily and efficiently expressed by Buuels decision to cast two actresses in the role, Carole Bouquet and ngela Molina, who pass the baton at unpredictable moments.
The films most striking image comes late in the story, as Rey pauses before a shop window to watch with excited intensity as a seamstress sews up a tear in a bloodstained silk nightgown. The shot returns us to the very start of Buuels career, to the similarly sexualized gashed eyeball at the beginning of Un Chien Andalou. But this time the rip is being repaired, rather than opened, reversing the trauma of sexuality but also suppressing it a gesture Buuel seems to regard as no less unhealthy, and no less futile (the shot also evokes the famous scene in Buuels 1953 Mexican film El, in which the protagonist approaches his sleeping wife holding a needle and thread).
With Buuel, the paradoxes and parallels never end. These great works have still not yielded all of their secrets. (Tristana: Cohen Film Collection; Blu-ray, $24.98; DVD, $19.98; PG. That Obscure Object of Desire: Lionsgate; Blu-ray, $29.99; R)
COMING SOON
HELLO, DOLLY! Barbra Streisand stars as the matchmaker Dolly Levy in Gene Kellys 1969 adaptation of the Broadway hit, now available in Blu-ray. With Walter Matthau, Michael Crawford, Tommy Tune and Louis Armstrong, the movie belongs to Miss Streisand, who visits it loo! king grea! t (and something like an eccentric kewpie doll) in Irene Scharaff costumes, and to the production designer, John DeCuir, Vincent Canby wrote in The Times in 1969. (Fox; Blu-ray, $24.99; G)
JOHN DIES AT THE END Don Coscarellis adaptation of David Wongs novel about a couple of slackers (Rob Mayes and Chase Williamson) who represent humanitys last hope in the face of a looming intergalactic menace. The movie is a ridiculous, preposterous, sometimes maddening experience, but also kind of a blast, Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in January. (Magnolia; Blu-ray, $29.98; DVD, $26.98; R)
THAT THING YOU DO! Tom Hanks wrote, directed and co-stars in this 1996 comedy set in the pop music world of the 60s, now in a Blu-ray edition that includes both the theatrical and directors cuts. With Tom Everett Scott and Liv Tyler. Mr. Hankss debut feature, written and directed with delightful good cheer, is rock n roll nostalgia presented as pure fizz, Janet Maslin wrote in The Times in 1996. (Fox; Blu-ray, $19.99; previously issued DVD, $19.98; PG)
THE BIBLE: THE EPIC MINISERIES A 10-part dramatization of Bible stories originally broadcast on the History Channel. Keith David narrates; with Diogo Morgado as Jesus and Roma Downey as Mary. The series is a rickety, often cheesy spectacle, Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times earlier this month. (Fox; Blu-ray, $69.99; DVD, $59.98; not rated)
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