Viridiana

"Viridiana" is an inexhaustible film, like any self-respecting masterpiece. Perhaps it is not the best film in the history of Spanish cinema. But it is the one that had an impact of greater proportions and the one that has known a more uneven fate. No other Spanish film has been accused of blasphemy by "L'Osservatore Romano", nor has it caused the dismissal of high-ranking government officials, nor has it been deprived of its nationality, which took twenty years to recover. Viridiana would not reach the sky of Spanish billboards until 1977. By then it was already a mythical work of our cinema. And it still is, in all fairness. "Viridiana" is an absolutely unique film, at once cold and vital, noble and grotesque, in which all of Luis Buñuel's obsessions take shape, and there were many of them. Buñuel, of course, painted his picture not in black and white, but with black humor. A black humor mixed with metaphor and with deep Hispanic roots, from Quevedo to Valle-Inclán, from Goya to Baroja, from Galdós to Poncela. Viridiana, after all, is nothing more than a celluloid monument.