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Tristana

  • 1970
  • PG
  • 1h 39m
IMDb RATING
7.4/10
13K
YOUR RATING
Tristana (1970)
Trailer for Tristana
Play trailer1:34
1 Video
99+ Photos
Drama

Shortly after her mother's death, an innocent and youthful woman will find refuge into the household of her middle-aged aristocratic guardian, who will submit her to his sexual advances.Shortly after her mother's death, an innocent and youthful woman will find refuge into the household of her middle-aged aristocratic guardian, who will submit her to his sexual advances.Shortly after her mother's death, an innocent and youthful woman will find refuge into the household of her middle-aged aristocratic guardian, who will submit her to his sexual advances.

  • Director
    • Luis Buñuel
  • Writers
    • Julio Alejandro
    • Luis Buñuel
    • Benito Pérez Galdós
  • Stars
    • Catherine Deneuve
    • Fernando Rey
    • Franco Nero
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.4/10
    13K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Luis Buñuel
    • Writers
      • Julio Alejandro
      • Luis Buñuel
      • Benito Pérez Galdós
    • Stars
      • Catherine Deneuve
      • Fernando Rey
      • Franco Nero
    • 39User reviews
    • 52Critic reviews
    • 93Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Nominated for 1 Oscar
      • 11 wins & 4 nominations total

    Videos1

    Tristana
    Trailer 1:34
    Tristana

    Photos109

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    + 105
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    Top cast32

    Edit
    Catherine Deneuve
    Catherine Deneuve
    • Tristana
    Fernando Rey
    Fernando Rey
    • Don Lope
    Franco Nero
    Franco Nero
    • Horacio
    Lola Gaos
    Lola Gaos
    • Saturna
    Antonio Casas
    Antonio Casas
    • Don Cosme
    Jesús Fernández
    • Saturno
    Vicente Soler
    Vicente Soler
    • Don Ambrosio
    José Calvo
    • Campanero
    Fernando Cebrián
    Fernando Cebrián
    • Dr. Miquis
    Antonio Ferrandis
    Antonio Ferrandis
    • Comprador
    José María Caffarel
    José María Caffarel
    • Don Zenón
    Cándida Losada
    Cándida Losada
    • Ciudadana
    Joaquín Pamplona
    • Don Joaquín
    Mary Paz Pondal
    Mary Paz Pondal
    • Muchacha
    • (as María Paz Pondal)
    Juanjo Menéndez
    Juanjo Menéndez
    • Don Cándido
    • (as Juan José Menéndez)
    José Blanch
    • Comandante
    Alfredo Santacruz
      Sergio Mendizábal
      • Headmaster
      • Director
        • Luis Buñuel
      • Writers
        • Julio Alejandro
        • Luis Buñuel
        • Benito Pérez Galdós
      • All cast & crew
      • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

      User reviews39

      7.413.4K
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      Featured reviews

      rogierr

      mediocre, but not completely pointless

      Try this: 'Viridiana' meets 'Cet obscure objet du désir', but it is one of the least shocking, least surreal and least fascinating films by Buñuel. There are some brief illusional sequences and Deneuve is said to be the most expensive part of this film, but her performance doesn't reflect it. It is simply not convincing enough. Nevertheless it is a recognizable Buñuel concept in a subtle and accessible film. Cinematographer Jose F. Aguayo (Viridiana) did a fine job (in color) that looks like a step in the direction of the cinematography of Buñuel's last three films. No music as always for maximum sobriety. I don't especially want to recommend this, though I would like to see it again some day myself. If only to revive the great Fernando Rey (French Connection, Viridiana, The Immortal Story)...

      7/10
      10colin-cooper

      Yet another Buñuel masterpiece.

      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.
      8rainking_es

      Buñuel, the genius...

      One of the latest works from the genius of Calanda, he was still stigmatized by Franco's dictatorship and he adapted a text by Benito Pérez Galdós about a young pretty girl (Catherine Deneuve) whose mother dies and has to go to live (and something else) with his stepfather (Fernando Rey).

      "Tristana" contains many of the common factors of Buñuel's movies: his total contempt for the ruling sectors of society and the rich people, for hypocrisy and Puritanism; his irreverence, and a wicked and implicit sexual content. Only the man who made "Belle de Jour" would dare to amputate a leg to the goddess Deneuve (one of the most beautiful creatures that ever walked the earth). Fernando Rey plays a typical Spanish "hidalgo" that's come down in the world and that sexually harass his stepdaughter.

      So, Buñuel not only hadn't lost his touch with the years, on the contrary, he felt more and more free as the time went by to let his genius flow… *My rate: 8/10
      10Quinoa1984

      melodrama lifted up into perverse tragedy as only Bunuel can do

      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.
      7ma-cortes

      Dramatic film about a strange relationship , being splendidly directed by the Spanish maestro of surrealism , the great Luis Buñuel

      When the young woman Tristana (Catherine Deneuve)'s mother dies, she is entrusted to the guardianship of the well-respected though old Don Lope (Fernando Rey) being served by the old maid (Lola Gaos) . There she is besieged as emotionally as sexually to be his lover . Don Lope is more than 60 years, single, liberal and anticlerical and natural inclination to idleness and indolence . Then Tristana meets the painter Horacio (Franco Nero) , they fall in love with each other and Tristana flees from Don Lope who faces competition from her suitor .

      This is the sensuous story of Tristana , a drama with surrealism and sour portrait upon social classes , catholicism , sexual abuses and many other things , being stunningly realized by the Spanish maestro of surrealism , the great Luis Buñuel . This is a typical Buñuel film , as there are a lot of symbolism , social critique , including mockery or wholesale review upon religion , especially Catholicism . Luis Buñuel was given a strict Jesuit education which sowed the seeds of his obsession with both subversive behavior and religion , issues well shown in a lot of films and that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . Here Bunuel gives a perverse studio about religion , old age , desire along with deformity ; and was strongly cut by Spanish censorship . The film describes unequal status of women , heir to a long tradition of marginalization, subjugation, exploitation and lack of rights , subsequently suffragists and protest movements emerge in pro-women . Interesting and thought-provoking screenplay from the same Luis Buñuel and Julio Alejandro , Buñuel's usual screenwriter , based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós ; they pull off a straight-faced treatment of shocking subject matter . Bunuel's adaptation retains the spirit of protest written by Galdos, and moved to a later time in 40 years to the novel . Nice acting by Fernando Rey as an old man who falls for the innocent girl in his charge , to the point of result to be perhaps the best performance of his long career . Rey played various Buñuel films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie , That Obscure object of Desire and Viridiana . And Catherine Deneuve's finest most enigmatic acting as a young cynical woman who goes to live with her guardian and subsequently turned into a bitter incapacitated cripple . The film relies heavily on the relationship between them , as is developed a rare lover/father relationship with her . One of Bunuel's most serious and serene ¨Tristana¨ is packed with surreal moments , criticism , absurd situations , masochism and nightmares . Furthermore , Buñuel satirizes and he carries out outright critical to aristocracy , bourgeoisie and attack upon religion . Pretty good support cast gives fine acting ; it is mostly formed by nice Spanish actors such as Antonio Casas , Fernando Cebrian, Jose Maria Caffarel , Antonio Ferrandis , Jose Calvo , Sergio Mendizabal , Juanjo Menendez ,among others . Beautifully shot in Toledo with a splendid cinematography by Jose Aguayo . Tristana was voted tenth best Spanish film by professionals and critics in 1996 Spanish cinema centenary and nominated for an Oscar ,film Foreign Language.

      Thid wry and dramatic motion picture was compellingly directed by Luis Buñuel who was voted the 14th Greatest Director of all time . This Buñuel's strange film belongs to his French second period ; in fact , it's plenty of known Spanish actors . Born in Calanda , Aragon (1900) , Buñuel subsequently moved to Madrid to study at the university there, where his close friends included Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. After moving to Paris , at the beginning Buñuel did a variety of film-related odd jobs , including working as an assistant to director Jean Epstein . With financial help from his mother and creative assistance from Dalí, he made his first film , this 17-minute "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), and immediately catapulted himself into film history thanks to its disturbing images and surrealist plot . The following year , sponsored by wealthy art patrons, he made his first picture , the scabrous witty and violent "Age of Gold" (1930), which mercilessly attacked the church and the middle classes, themes that would preoccupy Buñuel for the rest of his career . That career, though, seemed almost over by the mid-1930s, as he found work increasingly hard to come by and after the Spanish Civil War , where he made ¨Las Hurdes¨ , as Luis emigrated to the US where he worked for the Museum of Modern Art and as a film dubber for Warner Bros . He subsequently went on his Mexican period he teamed up with producer Óscar Dancigers and after a couple of unmemorable efforts shot back to international attention with the lacerating study of Mexican street urchins in ¨Los Olvidados¨ (1950), winning him the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. But despite this new-found acclaim, Buñuel spent much of the next decade working on a variety of ultra-low-budget films, few of which made much impact outside Spanish-speaking countries , though many of them are well worth seeking out . As he went on filming "The Great Madcap" , ¨The brute¨, "Wuthering Heights", ¨El¨ , "The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De la Cruz" , ¨Robinson Crusoe¨ , ¨Death in the garden¨ and many others . After returning his native country, Spain, by making ¨Viridiana¨ this film was prohibited on the grounds of blasphemy as well as ¨The milky way¨ or Via Lactea , both of them were strongly prohibited by Spanish censorship . This French-Spanish final period in collaboration with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carrière with notorious as well as polemic films such as ¨Viridiana¨ , ¨The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and ¨Belle De Jour¨. His last one was the notorious ¨That obscure object of desire¨ (1977) .

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      Storyline

      Edit

      Did you know

      Edit
      • Trivia
        Luis Buñuel said that many of Tristana's idiosyncrasies, including her habit of asking people to choose between nearly identical objects, was based on the director's sister's similar habits.
      • Quotes

        Don Lope: Poor workers. Cheated and then beaten. Work is a curse, Saturno. Down with work that you have to do to survive. That work isn't honorable, as some say. All it does is fatten the exploiting swine. However, what you do for pleasure ennobles man. If only we could all work like that. Look at me, I'd rather be hanged than work! So, I live poorly, but I live without working.

      • Alternate versions
        Originally released in Europe at 105 minutes.
      • Connections
        Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Multiplicity/The Frighteners/Kazaam/Fled/Celestial Clockwork (1996)
      • Soundtracks
        Étude No 12 in C minor, Op 10 'Revolutionary'
        Written by Frédéric Chopin

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      FAQ18

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      Details

      Edit
      • Release date
        • March 29, 1970 (Spain)
      • Countries of origin
        • Spain
        • Italy
        • France
      • Official site
        • Official site
      • Language
        • Spanish
      • Also known as
        • Mảnh Đời Của Tristana
      • Filming locations
        • Paseo Recaredo, Toledo, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain(opening and closing scenes with Saturna, Viridiana and the mute boy)
      • Production companies
        • Época Films
        • Talía Films
        • Selenia Cinematografica
      • See more company credits at IMDbPro

      Box office

      Edit
      • Gross US & Canada
        • $14,586
      • Opening weekend US & Canada
        • $4,754
        • Oct 14, 2012
      • Gross worldwide
        • $14,586
      See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

      Tech specs

      Edit
      • Runtime
        1 hour 39 minutes
      • Sound mix
        • Mono
      • Aspect ratio
        • 1.66 : 1

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