Nazarin

In 1900 Mexico, a Roman Catholic priest named Nazario (Francisco Rabal) lives and works in a slum house, surviving on alms. He befriends a woman named Beatriz (Marga Lopez), who tried to hang herself after her lover, El Pinto (Noe Murayama), left her, and a prostitute named Andara (Rita Macedo), who hides out with Nazario after she kills another prostitute in a knife fight. When another tenant informs the police that Nazario is hiding Andara, he leaves, and Andara and Beatriz set his room on fire before fleeing. Nazario is reprimanded by a church official for his involvement with Andara and is told he could lose his priesthood. He decides to take to the road and beg, dressed as a peasant so as not to disgrace the church, and live among the poor like Christ. He takes a job as a laborer in exchange for food, but this causes a fight among the other workers, and results in a gunfight.

Later, he runs into Beatriz and Andara, and Beatriz asks him to help cure her sick niece. After the child recovers, her superstitious mother thanks the "saint" for perfoming a miracle, and Beatriz and Andara follow Nazario on the road. In a cholera-ravaged village, he tries to administer last rites to a dying couple, but they reject him in favor of making love one last time. They leave and are joined by a dwarf named Ujo (Jesus Fernandez) who lusts after Andara. They then run into El Pinto, Beatriz's abusive ex-lover, who demands that she leave with him. When she refuses, he goes to the police, and they arrest Andara and Nazario and throw them in jail. Nazario is taunted and brutally beaten by another prisoner, but he's saved by an admitted church thief (Ignacio Lopez Tarso). Church authorities intercede and get Nazario separated from the chain gang, and he's given a private guard. As he's being led away, an old woman offers him a pineapple. He refuses her charity at first, then accepts, as the drumbeat of the gallows pounds in his head.

NAZARIN is a quietly devastating work of art, made with a brilliant economy of expression that bespeaks a filmmaker who's in absolute control of his medium and his message. For all of the comments about Bunuel's anti-clericalism, it should be noted that he is actually one of the very few filmmakers who has even considered questions of God and morality, let alone treated them in a thoughtful and intelligent way. Bunuel doesn't ridicule Nazario's blind faith, but saves his scorn for a hypocritical church hierarchy that condemns him as a "nonconformist rebel," as well as for a supposedly Christian society that would mock his spiritual purity. The film is a fairly faithful adaptation of an 1895 novel by Benito Perez Galdos (the author of TRISTANA as well), to which Bunuel added some typically dazzling surreal touches, such as the portrait of Jesus that Andara imagines to be laughing at her, or the way Beatriz blinks her eyes wildly and fantasizes her revenge on El Pinto, biting his lip until blood shoots out. The story is clearly meant to be a Christ-parable, showing what would really happen if He returned to earth; it also contains elements of Don Quixote, another tale of a Spanish madman, as well as Bunuel's later study of asceticism, SIMON OF THE DESERT (1965).

Bunuel has said, "In a a world as badly made as this, the only path to take is that of rebellion," and NAZARIN is about the impossibility of living a totally pure and good life in a corrupt world. Nazario begins as a well-meaning and devout man of God who only wants to practice the teachings of the Bible, but his efforts always backfire and he's constantly defeated by a world he cannot understand, a world filled with sex, violence, and casual cruelty. Even he is frightened by the display of hysteria and ignorant superstition of Beatriz's sister after he "cures" her sick child, and when he's beaten in jail, he starts to lose his faith and states that for the first time he can't distinguish between contempt and forgiveness. Noting that they're both in jail and about to be executed, the church thief who saves Nazario asks, "What good is your life? You're on the good side, I'm on the bad side. We're both totally useless." By the final scene, when he's given a piece of fruit by the old lady and hesitates before accepting it, Nazario has gone from being a noble holy man who's above such worldy concerns as food, to being reduced to a simple human being who is treated with pity. As the writer Octavio Paz wrote, NAZARIN "both reveals the human condition and shows us a way to surpass it. Nazario has lost God, but he has found love and fraternity." (Adult situations, violence.) leave a comment --Michael Scheinfeld