I'd Rather Be Hanged than Work
Tristana (1970)
directed by Luis Buñuel
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
I was recently, randomly reading about José Capablanca, the Cuban-born chess player who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. Even his name is romantic! The not quite-South American connection eventually led me to Marcel Duchamp's Buenos Aires holiday of 1918, when he spent nine months playing chess and making his own chess set with the help of a local craftsman. Duchamp favored "hypermodern openings like the Nimzo-Indian," and that sounds romantic, too.
I felt good about chess, or a trip to Argentina, but really I just wanted to imagine a cup of coffee with Capablanca or Duchamp in a nice climate somewhere. And I decided that, if I had a time machine, one of the places I would visit and things I would like to do is Mexico City and sit for an afternoon with Luis Buñuel. I wonder if Fernando Rey was as funny in person as he is in Buñuel's movies, and I don't know if Rey ever visited Buñuel across the ocean.
I could look that up, but I watched Tristana instead. Tristana was unavailable for a long time, but many of Buñuel's movies are at the library or online. He is not a forgotten director. Tristana is like a new letter from an old friend—except that it’s a film (but it arrived in the mail!). It is everything that all Buñuel movies are, that other people can describe better than me. I particularly liked Dave Kehr’s take on Buñuel's “rigorously neutral” dreamlike style.
As Rey says here, "Dreams can be very tactless." But even a nightmare is worth it because "the dead don't dream." Long live the living, and although Tristana is not a happy or celebratory movie—quite the opposite—it is a funny movie, full of life, all thanks to lecherous, liberal Don Lope. He is the villain and a hypocrite, but Buñuel is gentle with men like that, his knife in all the way to the hilt.
directed by Luis Buñuel
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
I was recently, randomly reading about José Capablanca, the Cuban-born chess player who was world chess champion from 1921 to 1927. Even his name is romantic! The not quite-South American connection eventually led me to Marcel Duchamp's Buenos Aires holiday of 1918, when he spent nine months playing chess and making his own chess set with the help of a local craftsman. Duchamp favored "hypermodern openings like the Nimzo-Indian," and that sounds romantic, too.
I felt good about chess, or a trip to Argentina, but really I just wanted to imagine a cup of coffee with Capablanca or Duchamp in a nice climate somewhere. And I decided that, if I had a time machine, one of the places I would visit and things I would like to do is Mexico City and sit for an afternoon with Luis Buñuel. I wonder if Fernando Rey was as funny in person as he is in Buñuel's movies, and I don't know if Rey ever visited Buñuel across the ocean.
I could look that up, but I watched Tristana instead. Tristana was unavailable for a long time, but many of Buñuel's movies are at the library or online. He is not a forgotten director. Tristana is like a new letter from an old friend—except that it’s a film (but it arrived in the mail!). It is everything that all Buñuel movies are, that other people can describe better than me. I particularly liked Dave Kehr’s take on Buñuel's “rigorously neutral” dreamlike style.
As Rey says here, "Dreams can be very tactless." But even a nightmare is worth it because "the dead don't dream." Long live the living, and although Tristana is not a happy or celebratory movie—quite the opposite—it is a funny movie, full of life, all thanks to lecherous, liberal Don Lope. He is the villain and a hypocrite, but Buñuel is gentle with men like that, his knife in all the way to the hilt.
posted by NPK at 4:52 PM
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