BY MICHAEL WOOD
Criterion Collection
A good friend of Luis Buñuel’s suggested in conversation that the director was likely to be damned twice: once for being an atheist, and once for joking about it on his deathbed. The friend, a priest, certainly knew what he was talking about, but I don’t believe he really thought Buñuel would be damned. God can’t ultimately condemn serious atheists. They pay far more attention to him than halfhearted believers do, and they help to keep him in business. On the soundtrack of Buñuel’s film Nazarín (1959), we hear a barrel organ playing an old song called “Dios nunca muere” (God Never Dies). The song in itself is a bit of popular piety, an assertion of enduring faith. In Buñuel’s movie, it is an ironic tribute to the director’s everlasting antagonist, a correction of Nietzsche’s premature announcement of God’s death. And when Buñuel says, as he frequently and famously did, “Thank God I’m still an atheist,” the remark is not only a witty paradox, it is a form of courtesy. Why wouldn’t an atheist want to show gratitude to the nonexistent deity who never lets him down?
Simon of the Desert (1965) was the last film Buñuel made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Buñuel got all kinds of sharp, ironic effects from glossy color photography in the six films, five French and one Spanish, he went on to direct before he died, but there is a purity and grace in Figueroa’s images that is unequaled in Buñuel’s body of work. Writing enthusiastically of Simon of the Desert, Pauline Kael suggests Buñuel’s movies “have a thinner texture that begins to become a new kind of integrity, and they affect us as fables.” She is thinking of his indifference to the large emotions directors usually want their actors to go for, but we could also consider Figueroa’s contribution to this effect. His images are as much about the desert as about Simon, and we can almost see the thinness of the air.
The film tells the story of the miracles and temptations of a stylite, an ascetic who spent his life on top of a pillar. The model is Saint Simeon Stylites, but Buñuel reminds us that the early Christian world was full of such figures, and his character is “simply called Simon.” At the beginning of the film, Simon is about to move from a small pillar (ten feet or so high) to a much taller one (twenty-five feet or more), provided for him by a rich benefactor. Buñuel’s cool irony suggests that even in the realm of renunciation there are opportunities for professional advancement. The local bishop solemnly announces that Simon has spent six years, six months, and six days on his old pillar, and no one in the film seems to notice he is naming the number of the beast in the Book of Revelation. Buñuel, of course, thinks that any extreme attempt at holiness is likely to call up its opposite, and he makes sure the devil appears several times in the film. The devil takes the agreeable form of Silvia Pinal, the Mexican actress who played Viridiana in Buñuel’s 1961 film, and Pinal in turn takes several forms: a handsome woman carrying a water pitcher, a seductress dressed in a schoolgirlish sailor suit, an implausible young male shepherd, complete with fake curls and beard, a worldly woman with a fancy hairdo, a miniskirted dancer in a New York nightclub. The devil makes a point of the interest he/she shares with Simon: the hermit is looking for God’s approval, and the devil has known him for a long time. “I also believe in God the Father Almighty,” he/she says.
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