Tristana

La doña de la casa made, not born, "Tristana... Triste Ana." The bedrock is Stroheim's Queen Kelly, the orphaned maiden at the onset wears mourning black to set off Catherine Deneuve's porcelain skin, a glimpse of her stocking later on earns the cheeky peeper a slap. Her guardian (Fernando Rey) is a penurious aristocrat with a firm belief in the rebelliousness of loafing, a stickler for outdated codes who sprouts "horns and tail" around the ladies. The ward acquiesces to his seduction, the dapper goat proclaims himself "your father and your husband. One or the other, as it suits me." She moons over a medieval inquisitor's marble effigy and enjoys choosing between two identical things (courtyard pillars, say, or chickpeas), the street picked on a whim leads to the painter (Franco Nero) with whom she will elope. A local proverb predicts her return, "la mujer honrada, la pierna quebrada y en casa." Toledo on the cusp of the Thirties, Luis Buñuel's old haunts, the ideal stage for the stately comedy of power. Stricken with a tumorous leg, the heroine comes back to her defiler and grows imperious on crutches, taking covert pride in revealing the stump under her skirt. ("It takes all kinds," she shrugs when reminded of the allure her mutilation might hold to certain men.) The innocent hardens, the libertine mellows—properly henpecked after having once scoffed at "the sickly scent of conjugal happiness," he stops dyeing his goatee and invites clerics over for hot cocoa and huge sticks of sugar. "The better he is, the less I like him." Blatant symbolism is humorously dispensed throughout, the voiceless proletariat is given to onanistic absences, a castrated bell tolls atop the priapic tower. Wyler's The Little Foxes figures tellingly in the icy coda, Polanski overhauls the whole kit and caboodle in Bitter Moon. "It's good to have dreams, even if they're frightening... The dead don't dream." Cinematography by José F. Aguayo. With Lola Gaos, Antonio Casas, Jesús Fernández, Vicente Soler, and Fernando Cebrián.