Nazarin (Mexico, 1959) 94 min B&W DIR: Luis Buñuel. PROD: Manuel Barbachano Ponce. SCR: Julio Alejandro, Luis Buñuel; based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. MUSIC: Rodolfo Halffter. DOP: Gabriel Figueroa. CAST: Francisco Rabal, Marga López, Rita Macedo, Jesús Fernández. (Películas Nacionales)
Nazarin is among Luis Buñuel’s strongest films of this period. This powerful study is of one man’s unconventional, yet selfless dedication to his religion. The film opens in the poverty-stricken area of the city, in which crime and prostitution are the common professions. The chief storyline in this segment is when Nazarin (Francisco Rabal) shelters a prostitute, Andara (Rita Macedo), who is wounded after a squabble with another “working girl” which leaves the latter dead.
The second half of the film chronicles Nazarin’s pilgrimage. Without money, food or material possessions, he travels the earth to spread the good word, and subsists only on the fortune of others (as before, home among the sinners). He offers a simple prayer for a dying boy, and when cured, two women consider him to be a miracle worker and thus join his quest. One of the women is a reformed Andara (which is an interestingly ironic, but contrived idea). Nazarin’s execution of his beliefs are often met with confusion and anger. He berates a colonel for treating a fellow human being like a dog, and his earnest efforts to pray for a child dying of a plague results in anger from his grief-stricken parents who want privacy in their final moments with him.
Much has been made of Nazarin‘s sly re-telling of the life of Christ. Nazarin spends time trying to help the sinners, he lives on the smallest of means, gets aid from prostitutes, makes an attempt at an honest living, and finally, ends up in shackles between two thieves. However, this film is also about a deeply personal spiritual journey. Even his colleagues in the faith think his approach to religion is unconventional to say the least. Like the Christ-like figure in Dreyer’s Ordet, Nazarin is arguably more devout in his religion than the aristocrats who use their faith as a symbol of power. (Plus, Rabal’s acting is very similar to the deceptively passive figure in Dreyer’s film.)
Some have charged this film as anti-Christian. However, the greater truth is probably that his work is rejecting the false power structure that surrounds the church. Religion is not about a class structure, but an equality -an assimilation- among people.
Nazarin is indicative of Buñuel’s savage beauty. There is no false sentimentality here: a work filled with hardship, emaciated prostitutes and a dwarf figure are the “good” secondary characters, yet all that brutal honesty is its art and beauty. One could say its greatest fault is that it is a studio picture, which undermines its striking realism. The scenes in the poor section of the city are as representational as anything in a Chaplin movie. When it is indoors, the three-point lighting and hospital-clean sets work against the milieu. Nonetheless Nazarin remains one of Buñuel’s most interesting films. And because it was such a success at Cannes, one presumed that once again Buñuel was ready for international rediscovery (as his earlier success, Los Olvidados, promised yet did not reward).