Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Iseerphia All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Claudio Carvalho In the 30's, in Spain, the teenager Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) becomes an orphan when her mother, who is the servant of Don Lope (Fernando Rey), dies. Don Lope is a decadent but respected aristocrat, anticlerical and liberal with socialist principles, and he becomes the guardian of Tristana. Don Lope sexually abuses of Tristana and develops a strange lover/father relationship with her.When Tristana meets the painter Horacio (Franco Nero), they fall in love with each other and Tristana flees from Don Lope. However, years later, Horacio brings Tristana back to Don Lope with a terminal disease on her leg. She has a severed leg and survives, and Don Lope asks her hand in marriage. She accepts but now Tristana is a bitter and cynical woman and Don Lope feels the consequence of his acts in the past."Tristana" is a morbid tale of lost of innocence by Luis Buñuel. I had seen this film for the last time on 05 Feb 2003 and despite the wonderful performances of Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, it is not among my favorite Buñuel's films. As usual, the director criticizes the Church and the bourgeois class but his famous surrealism is only presented in Tristana's nightmare. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Tristana"

MisterWhiplash It might appear to the uninitiated that Luis Bunuel is making with Tristana at first a good but very predictable melodrama that turns somewhere in the second half mark into a strange power-play of desire turned on its head. But in reality, when looking at it after seeing a couple of his films, Bunuel's work with Tristana is somehow kind of touching. He cares about all of his characters- none of whom what they seem or dumbed down to Lifetime movie levels- and in this stuck-in-its-ways society there are boundaries that are crossed in tragic means. Usually one might expect some dark or subtle comedy of manners or satire on society, but here it's stripped away, as it was for some of Viridiana, and all that's left is a spare, tense and expertly manipulated tale where the tables are turned once or twice on the couple of Don Lope (Fernando Rey) and Tristana (Catherine Deneauve, maybe her most physically demanding of her two Bunuel roles).One thing that's extraordinary about how Bunuel directs and allows for his actors to play the scenes is that the emotions are only heightened to a certain level, and never with the aid of things like music or tears. It is what it is: Don Lope has taken care of Tristana as her guardian since her mother died, and now has inserted himself as her father/husband figure, with his servant Saturna (stern-faced but understanding Lola Gaos) a kind of unofficial confessional. Tristana wants some freedom, just to go out and walk around, and feels caught by Don Lope even when not doing anything... until she meets Franco Nero's Don Horacio, a painter who could promise a new life. This goes without saying that one should take it for granted that Tristana isn't *that* young and could take care of herself without Lope, but maybe this is part of the point of the slight absurdity- and eventual tragedy- of this struggle.Two years go by after she leaves Lope for Horacio, with a tumor in her leg. She's now a cripple, and now once again a kind of mental prisoner in Lope's home; the complexity of old man Lope as being duplicitous is seen right after he finds out she's sick and Horacio asks for Lope to help keep her home, and he nearly skips home saying "she'll never leave again!" All of this, leading up to a final twist that is very satisfying if extending the tragic dimension of Lope and Tristana, would be soapy and tawdry and, possibly, very standard in other hands. For Bunuel, there's a lot of personal ground here; I wonder at times if Rey is a little like one of those actors a director of Bunuel's auteur-stature uses as a means of expressing himself through an actor, or if it's just because he's so good at playing wicked AND sympathetic bourgeois. And the mixture of ideas, if not really themes, covering what's love and over-control, religion, deformity, a free will are potent and exciting even in such subtle and (as Maltin said) serenely filmed territory.It's also a minor triumph for Deneuve, who between this and Belle de jour did some of her best work as an actress for the notorious surrealist. Her character's continual dream of Lope's beheaded top dangling from a church tower is the closest we see to a classic surrealist scene, though it's reminiscent of Los Olvidados as brilliantly expressing one character's mind-set. Deneuve is up for the challenge of putting up a tough interior and exterior presence; she gets paler towards the end (if this was for real or just a bad print I couldn't tell), and there's a lot of pain in her eyes and expression throughout. It's great work for one of the director's most subtly demanding works- beneath its conventional framework of a love-triangle story is sorrow and horror at the human condition.

Galina Sometimes hilarious, often dream like surreal drama tells about a young woman, heavenly beautiful and innocent in the beginning, bitter and pitiless but still heavenly beautiful sans one leg in the end. Catherine Deneuve gave perhaps her best performance as an orphaned 19 years old girl who after her mother's death has been adapted by the aristocratic free-thinking atheist, Don Lope Garrido in absolutely fantastic performance by Bunuel's favorite leading man in the latter half of the director's career, Fernando Rey (That Obscure Object of Desire, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Tristana, Viridiana). Don Lope is a man of honor, a gentleman who believes in those of ten commandments that don't have to do with sex. He also takes pride in having not worked a day in his life because the only work is noble that is done "with pleasure". He rather would sell for a fraction of their real cost the pieces of art that had belonged to his family for generations. This is the man Tristana comes to live with. Very soon he would seduce her and make her his mistress justifying it with the words that she is better off this way than being on the streets. Don Lope is a preacher of freedom in the relationships between a man and a woman and for him, "marital bliss has sickly odor". Young Tristana is a good student and eventually she chooses to leave Don Lope and to run off with a young and attractive artist (Franco Nero). From this point on, the movie takes an unexpected and unusual turn..."Tristana", based on a famous romance novel written by Benito Perez Galdos was adapted by Bunuel into simple on the surface but incredibly rich, complex, funny, in one word, brilliant dissection of moral degradation as only Bunuel could make it. The film is also a portrayal of a strong and beautiful woman who wishes to survive and be independent even if it goes against the established rules of behavior of her time.P.S. I wonder if Rainer Werner Fassbinder had seen "Tristana" and if he had, would it give him any ideas about his own trilogy of strong, beautiful, independent, and corrupted women trying to survive in the post-war Germany?

colin-cooper Luis Buñuel had a mastery of screen technique attained by very few directors. Confronted by the script of Tristana, what contemporary director would know where to start?Buñuel's attention to detail is extraordinary. Every scene is packed with visual interest. In some strange way, the decor forms an essential part of the structure; it is a facet of Buñuel's unique vision. Moreover, he not only knows exactly when to end a sequence, but how to end it. For instance, when Don Lope (Rey) puts down the dog and walks away, the camera follows not him but the dog: an endearing and brilliant touch, and there are many more. Compelling throughout, even spellbinding.If this film were a framed picture hanging in a gallery, thousands would come to see it and Buñuel would be acclaimed as a great artist. He was a great artist, in fact, but the cinema is an ephemeral form and people forget. We need to buy the videos and watch these fine movies from time to time, just to remind ourselves that a film can be a significant art form and not merely a commercial product cynically synthesised to extract the largest amount of money from the greatest number of people.