Nazarin
Friday, 1:15 pm, Regal Downtown #3
Director: Luis Buñuel
Writers: Luis Buñuel, Julio Alejandro, and Emilio Carballido
Cinematographer: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Francisco Rabal
Running Time: 94 min
Often referred to as the father of cinematic surrealism, Luis Buñuel’s strict Jesuit upbringing undoubtedly influenced his ironic obsession with religion and subversive behavior. Years after his first feature, L’Age d’or (1930), attacked the church and the middle class, Buñuel reaffirmed his thematic preoccupations with the release of Nazarin in 1959.
Adapted from Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel, and filmed by prolific Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa in Mexico City and villages in the Cuautla region, Nazarin paints a sensitive portrait of a misunderstood and ineffectual Catholic priest living among whores, beggars, and thieves in the early 1900s. Creating his own sort of parable, Buñuel imagines how Christ would be treated if he returned to the modern world unrecognized and set out to live selflessly in accordance with the Gospels.
It is Father Nazario’s (Francisco “Paco” Rabal) charitable nature that sets the story in motion. When he shelters a prostitute, Andara (Rita Macedo), who killed another woman in a fight, the church dismisses Nazario. He then sets off on his own pilgrimage with Andara and her sister, who follow him as disciples (or is it lovers?). Through Father Nazario’s journey, Buñuel examines the struggle to remain good in the face of corruption, the impotence of the modern church, and the power of humanism over divine justice.
While his subsequent films such as Viridiana (1961) offer unequivocal critiques of Catholicism and the church as a modern institution, Buñuel remained sympathetic to Father Nazario, making these comments during a mid-1970s interview for That Obscure Object of Desire: “Look at how violence is publicized. The excess of information is like a plague. Today, terrorists are more famous than movie stars. In our century, we thought we would finish with dictatorships, but one ends and two more pop up … I no longer believe in social progress. I can only believe in a few exceptional individuals of good faith like Nazario even though they fail.”
