DVD OF THE WEEK: Simon of the Desert

"I am still, thank God, an atheist."
- Luis Buñuel, in a 1960 L'Express interview

Buñuelian references most commonly point to his early, little-s scandalous, capital-S Surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dalí (Un chien andalou, L'Âge d'or) or his later-career French masterpieces that made him an international art-house luminary (Belle de jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire). But in between those eras—during an on-again, off-again Mexican exile of two decades—the legendary Spanish-born auteur directed 21 films, many of which works are in desperate need of rescue/distribution. From that underrepresented era, Criterion has today released 1962's The Exterminating Angel and this questionably unfinished parable of religious devotion, his last to be made in Mexico. Why questionably, you say? It's true that producer Gustavo Alatriste ran out of money after five reels were shot, hence the short running time, but what Simon of the Desert achieves with an appropriately laser-focused single theme—the extreme faith of a ascetic who lives atop a pillar in the middle of an arid nowhere—couldn't have been a tighter or more fully realized satire with whatever added details, aesthetics or gags might've been.

The windblown-bearded Simon (Claudio Brook), a character based on the 5th-century Syrian saint Simeon Stylites, has been praying on high for six years, six weeks and six days—a Satanic warning?—before the local peasants and clergy offer him a taller pillar to take root. (Had Buñuel been an American born a few decades later, perhaps the second column would've been marked by product placements, or branded with the benefactors' faces.) With repeated vertical camera movements and a combination of tight close-ups and wide-angle shots from above or below to accentuate Simon's elevated plane (shot in stunning, low-contrast grays by Gabriel Figueroa), Buñuel cynically but never haughtily examines the life this dedicated servant of God has made for himself, away from all others. Is he a fool who has wasted his life, as in the droll bit where Simon begins blessing every creature around him, stopping just short of sanctifying a piece of lettuce that was stuck between his teeth? Or is his pious nature meant to look foolishly self-righteous, since Satan herself (Viridiana star Silvia Pinal, wearing several disguises, from breast-exposing schoolgirl to lamb-kicking Jesus Christ) appears only to him to tempt him into his literal and spiritual descent?

Questioning even his own words on high, and justifiably growing more irritable with each prophecy or miracle (a thief whose hands have been cut off are restored by the power of Simon's sermon; a beat later, as the crowd walks away without a pinch of gratitude, the man even smacks his daughter), our martyred hero comes to realize in a hilarious, left-field ending set in a New York City discotheque, that his life's work may just be meaningless to anyone besides himself. Consider it the exploratory atheist movie Bill Maher wishes he could've made instead of his far less honest, pointed, modest, artful or funny Religulous.

Posted by ahillis at February 10, 2009 6:11 PM