How you'll most likely take in a film like Nazarin is if you have context and/or a little prior experience with the filmmaker Luis Bunuel; conversely, it could be a completely absorbing and intellectually intriguing piece if it's you're first time with him. Bunuel was for his life and career an avowed non-believer (one of his truest and wittiest quotes: "thank God, I'm an Athiest"), and so one comes to a story like in Nazarin about the titular priest who, following a fire in his quite poor abode, decides to go around the countryside in a sort of pure journey without any definite end.
All Nazarin knows (Francisco Rabal in a towering performance, mostly for hoe he keeps his emotions at an even keel for 90% of it) is that he has to find some purpose in his position, though he is constantly witness to and victim of miscreants and evil-doers and just people who will kick him and them kick him again knowing he won't fight back. Oh, and a couple of women look to him as a SAINT, to which he tries to ward off but to no avail.
These two women are Beatriz (Marga Lopez) and Andara (Rita Marcado), who are coming to this priest in a couple of dire straits as the former has gone kind of insane after her lover has left her for the military and the latter, who initially tells off Nazarin (he badmouthed a cousin who knows) and then comes back after killing someone. How full in their belief in Nazarin are they? Well... it would seem like quite a lot, at least for Beatriz (watch her flutter her eyes before she goes into a state at one point).
But this idea of what belief means, what faith in actual practice and the exact cost of following a life of really being there for people, like the sickest ones who are very poor and can't get out of bed and may be near death, is at the heart of this film and what Bunuel I think is interrogating. I don't think necessarily he is unsure about his own faith, or lack thereof, but he grew up in a Catholic world and society in Spain and saw first-hand the good intentions but also the hypocrites and charlatans and how the "normal" people will very much go into Church one way and leave acting totally different. Religion is an institution, and the hierarchy is there to keep people in place just like anywhere else, and Nazarin, morally knowing how to be but understanding that people can get "insane" in going overboard (ill get to this momentsrily) but still going out into the world to practice what Jesus preaches by helping people and walking mostly barefoot.... he's seen as an "eccentric."
Nazarin is a great film of contradictions, namely that there's this satirical bite to it that Bunuel can't not have here on one hand; notice the midpoint, which is where I think this takes off from just a very good story (the first act is loaded with colorful histrionics and dabs into comedy before that big fire changes the course of things) into being much more, when Nazarin is called, reluctantly, to see to a very ill woman by Beatriz and some other women in a small village. When he goes in he does what little prayer he can and yet somehow his reputation, whatever the hell it is, has been reinterpreted as to a Healer with a capital H. This is darkly amusing but it also speaks to how people, usually lacking in certain education or any access to medicine or Healthcare, will go to whatever seems like the best chance to healing. And then when the girl Nazarin saw the next day has been healed, it seems whatever he did.... worked! What did he do? He doesn't know!
So, there's this thematic line running through the film about how much some of the characters look up to Nazarin, what his effect is, but this is not a full blown satire or I should say Bunuel doesn't take any easy road with depicting these people. Another filmmaker I could see creating a story where Nazarin gives in to the cynicism and becomes a cult leader or something. Instead what we get in this film is something closer to Neo-Realism, in acting and direction, and in casting for supporting players (oh that little guy is a stand out, a very charming devilish presence), and it gives the film this edge even as he and his crew film everything so simply and clearly (there's camera moves, for sure, and one near the end as one cart passes Nazarin that I found very moving), but he makes it about the emotions of the characters, and to this Lopez and Macedo are excellent here and make these two women intense and fierce and show strongly how these women may believe in God, but they definitely believe in this man on his Jesus-like course through the countryside.
What I mean is this film is so interesting to me because it does call out the double standards of Christianity, how people can turn on someone or people so quickly and judge so quickly (notice how many times other people assume Nazarin has these two women to basically sleep with), and how our titular hero is a man of faith but he's not without reason (he uses a word many evangelicals find dirty today, "Science") and really wants to be left alone even after he takes his would-be "disciples", and yet I don't think this could ever be called blasphemous or something controversial - unless of course one is so stuck to a dogma that anything outside of it is filth. Luis Bunuel's courage and skill as an artist is to give us a story like this and let us decide for ourselves what's what and doesn't judge anyone (well, save for men in uniforms with guns and the higher Clergy, he knows where they can shove it).
I'll be thinking on this one for some time, maybe more than some of his other movies; my immediate take is that Nazarin himself is what bumps this into the director's top tier, how he's written and portrayed as this relatively pure soul who wants to do Good and knows what goes into Goodness (he tells this to another at one point), but feeling it and doing it in a cruel and poor world such as this Mexican rural landscape is staggering. Lastly, it's not one of his more surrealistic pieces (albeit the one seizure/hallucination memory Beatriz has is like a sprinkle on this soufflé), but the ambiguity, even down to that final shot, is spellbinding.
All Nazarin knows (Francisco Rabal in a towering performance, mostly for hoe he keeps his emotions at an even keel for 90% of it) is that he has to find some purpose in his position, though he is constantly witness to and victim of miscreants and evil-doers and just people who will kick him and them kick him again knowing he won't fight back. Oh, and a couple of women look to him as a SAINT, to which he tries to ward off but to no avail.
These two women are Beatriz (Marga Lopez) and Andara (Rita Marcado), who are coming to this priest in a couple of dire straits as the former has gone kind of insane after her lover has left her for the military and the latter, who initially tells off Nazarin (he badmouthed a cousin who knows) and then comes back after killing someone. How full in their belief in Nazarin are they? Well... it would seem like quite a lot, at least for Beatriz (watch her flutter her eyes before she goes into a state at one point).
But this idea of what belief means, what faith in actual practice and the exact cost of following a life of really being there for people, like the sickest ones who are very poor and can't get out of bed and may be near death, is at the heart of this film and what Bunuel I think is interrogating. I don't think necessarily he is unsure about his own faith, or lack thereof, but he grew up in a Catholic world and society in Spain and saw first-hand the good intentions but also the hypocrites and charlatans and how the "normal" people will very much go into Church one way and leave acting totally different. Religion is an institution, and the hierarchy is there to keep people in place just like anywhere else, and Nazarin, morally knowing how to be but understanding that people can get "insane" in going overboard (ill get to this momentsrily) but still going out into the world to practice what Jesus preaches by helping people and walking mostly barefoot.... he's seen as an "eccentric."
Nazarin is a great film of contradictions, namely that there's this satirical bite to it that Bunuel can't not have here on one hand; notice the midpoint, which is where I think this takes off from just a very good story (the first act is loaded with colorful histrionics and dabs into comedy before that big fire changes the course of things) into being much more, when Nazarin is called, reluctantly, to see to a very ill woman by Beatriz and some other women in a small village. When he goes in he does what little prayer he can and yet somehow his reputation, whatever the hell it is, has been reinterpreted as to a Healer with a capital H. This is darkly amusing but it also speaks to how people, usually lacking in certain education or any access to medicine or Healthcare, will go to whatever seems like the best chance to healing. And then when the girl Nazarin saw the next day has been healed, it seems whatever he did.... worked! What did he do? He doesn't know!
So, there's this thematic line running through the film about how much some of the characters look up to Nazarin, what his effect is, but this is not a full blown satire or I should say Bunuel doesn't take any easy road with depicting these people. Another filmmaker I could see creating a story where Nazarin gives in to the cynicism and becomes a cult leader or something. Instead what we get in this film is something closer to Neo-Realism, in acting and direction, and in casting for supporting players (oh that little guy is a stand out, a very charming devilish presence), and it gives the film this edge even as he and his crew film everything so simply and clearly (there's camera moves, for sure, and one near the end as one cart passes Nazarin that I found very moving), but he makes it about the emotions of the characters, and to this Lopez and Macedo are excellent here and make these two women intense and fierce and show strongly how these women may believe in God, but they definitely believe in this man on his Jesus-like course through the countryside.
What I mean is this film is so interesting to me because it does call out the double standards of Christianity, how people can turn on someone or people so quickly and judge so quickly (notice how many times other people assume Nazarin has these two women to basically sleep with), and how our titular hero is a man of faith but he's not without reason (he uses a word many evangelicals find dirty today, "Science") and really wants to be left alone even after he takes his would-be "disciples", and yet I don't think this could ever be called blasphemous or something controversial - unless of course one is so stuck to a dogma that anything outside of it is filth. Luis Bunuel's courage and skill as an artist is to give us a story like this and let us decide for ourselves what's what and doesn't judge anyone (well, save for men in uniforms with guns and the higher Clergy, he knows where they can shove it).
I'll be thinking on this one for some time, maybe more than some of his other movies; my immediate take is that Nazarin himself is what bumps this into the director's top tier, how he's written and portrayed as this relatively pure soul who wants to do Good and knows what goes into Goodness (he tells this to another at one point), but feeling it and doing it in a cruel and poor world such as this Mexican rural landscape is staggering. Lastly, it's not one of his more surrealistic pieces (albeit the one seizure/hallucination memory Beatriz has is like a sprinkle on this soufflé), but the ambiguity, even down to that final shot, is spellbinding.