Luis Buñuel, Pérez Galdós and the Tristana stump

• Centennial Trapiello explains to Galdós

THE FILM WAS IN CANNES

Double anniversary, double occasion. In celebration of the centenary of the death of Benito Pérez Galdós, we could well read his novel Tristana (1892) and see the film version of Luis Buñuel , released on March 29, 1970 and projected out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival in the month of May of the same year, that is, exactly half a century ago. The novel is available from several publishers - I have read the Alianza pocket edition, with a very instructive and favorable prologue by the Galdosian expert Ricardo Gullón - and the film can be seen on Filmin and purchased on DVD and Blu Ray. The film and the novel are very different. Let's say, just to start, that Buñuel and his screenwriter Julio AlejandroThey moved the action from the end of the 19th century to the period between 1929 and 1935 and, what is even more important, they changed the scene of Madrid -fundamental in the novel- for Toledo, fundamental in the film and well-liked by the filmmaker due to his youthful forays into the city. Let us say without anesthesia that Tristana , despite the condescending understanding of some unrepentant Galdosians, is one of the weakest novels of the Canary writer, in no way at the height of El amigo Manso (1882), Tormento (1884), Fortunata and Jacinta ( 1887) or Misericordia (1897), just to cite four great works by the brilliant writer. In Tristana , the second of the novels of the so-called "spiritualist cycle", Galdós tells the story of Don Lope, an old man, a donjuanesco and a bourgeois "liberalote" in erotic and economic decline, and the 19-year-old orphan girl he takes at home under his protection, whom he promptly seduces and turns into his forced lover. Don Lope, in a despicable double role as father and husband , transmits to Tristana some of his liberal ideas, he is corroded by jealousy when the girl becomes girlfriend of Horacio, a mediocre painter who abandons her, and he is moved -and also master of the situation - when knee cancer forces the amputation of a girl's leg. Tristana's double love and health debacle will end up leading her to a canonical marriage with Don Lope.

A NOVEL THAT PROMISED

Tristana was already coldly received by critics - with the important exception of Clarín - at the time of its publication. Benevolent historians argue that critics turned their full attention to the almost simultaneous premiere of Reality , Galdós' well-known theatrical debut. But no. Tristana is making water. Emilia Pardo Bazán , after finishing the substantial part of her passionate romance with Galdós, put the novel to the brink: " Tristana promised to be something else," he wrote. What did Tristana promise ? At the heart of the booklet and melodramatic argument summarized above, there is an essential streak in its development: Tristana's desire and ideal, in accordance with the feminist ideas of Pardo Bazán, of being an independent, "free and honest" woman, capable not only to fend for itself, but to stand out as an intellectual or artist. This line of force is not only frustrated, but Tristana ends up as a church blessed, married and a baker for Don Lope. And, on top, Galdós wonders and answers in the outcome: "Were they both happy? ... Maybe".

DESCRIPTIONS AND ZALAMERÍAS

Leaving the context of academic studies, where these issues have been and are widely debated -not so the pioneering ideal of life in the field of Horacio-, we can say something even worse: a reader today does not understand well where they come from. Tristana, her firm emancipatory ideals, contemplates with amazement the unusual and dizzying skill with which the girl educates herself as a varied reader, thinker and artist and can barely bear the kitsch and flattery -I insist, in current eyes- of the long correspondence between the girl and her loving painter, who has gone to Villajoyosa. They will be very of the time -they are present in the letters of Doña Emilia to Don Benito-, but today they do not hold those goodies as, nevertheless, the magnificent descriptions of Madrid -the Chamberí neighborhood, especially- or the extraordinary and detailed psychological investigations of the novel, particularly those concerning Don Lope.

THE LEG, THE LEG

Don Lope and the leg. Buñuel said in a historic interview - read the book Buñuel por Buñuel (Plot) - that Tristana was "one of Galdós' worst novels" and wrote in My Last Sigh (his memoirs) that he was attracted to the character of Don Lope. Of course. He was attracted by the vicissitudes of an old seducer with a girl, by the painful erotic siege of an old gallant towards a young woman who resists him. Always with Fernando Rey -as an alter ego ? -, it is the story of Don Jaime and his novice niece that Buñuel had already told in Viridiana (1961) and the one that would count seven years later, with the elderly Mathieu and the dancer Conchita , in That dark object of desire . That's the thing: the dark object of desire. And, a fetishist of the female leg and foot - as Jeanne Moreau amply demonstrated in Diary of a Waitress (1963) -, Buñuel was interested in Tristana's leg: the leg from which she takes off her stockings to lie with Don Lope (we don't see him), the diseased leg, the amputated leg (which we don't see when Tristana plays the pedal piano either), the orthopedic leg (that Tristana leaves on the bed), the leg that Tristana lacks when she does his frontal nude before the deaf-mute Saturn, nude of Catherine Deneuve that the director does not let us see because the censorship would not have allowed it and because, with complete certainty, the filmmaker prefers that the spectators imagine it, with a stump and everything, to our air . Buñuel, therefore, changed the place of the action, changed the time, as soon as he retained the main characters - yes the maid Saturn and the loving painter - he increased the relevance of others - the aforementioned Saturn, son of the maid, so outgoing - he left out a multitude of episodes and hardly used the dialogues of the novel. It also changed, and very significantly, the ending, turning it (I don't detail it, just in case) into a sharp revenge of Tristana towards Don Lope. To his own, with an apparently functional and clear-cut staging, he focused on the darkness of desire, on the morbid relationship between Don Lope and Tristana (and his leg), on his beloved anticlerical notes (the priests) and socio-political anarchists (the guards who charge against the workers, the thief that Don Lope takes away from the police ...), in the achievement of surrealist images (Don Lope's head like a bell clapper, Tristana's almost kiss to the cadaverous and sepulchral marble face of Cardinal Tavera ...) and, of course, he paid tribute to his "holy places" in Toledo, starting with the foreground of the film, a view of the Greco of the city from his raids, shot at in turn honored by Pedro Almodóvar at the start of La piel que habito (2011).

WITH THE BLESSING OF FRAGA

The film had almost two million viewers after its premiere in Spain and was acclaimed by international critics as it passed through Cannes. French critics regretted that Tristana had not gone to the competition, because for this Catherine Deneuve could not win the prize that, according to them, she deserved. La Deneuve, with her look of "Japanese lady" -according to Galdós de Tristana- and with her aura of cold blonde liking Alfred Hitchcock -which she confessed, other than such, to Buñuel her enthusiasm for the leg issue-, She had not been very happy with the Spanish director after working with him on Belle de jour (1966), but the film was a Spanish co-production with France and Italy - hence the presence of Franco Nero as the bland painter - and François Truffaut , her boyfriend at the time and a visitor to the shoot, encouraged her to participate. On the third attempt, Buñuel managed to adapt Galdós's novel, and that thanks to a personal and solo interview that he had - time before filming - with the then Francoist minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne , who authorized the production. Buñuel said that Fraga had seemed "intelligent and friendly". With these guarantees, Tristana was chosen as a Spanish candidate for the Oscar and was nominated for the statuette for the Best Film in a Non-English Language. But he did not win. Spanish critics (some) displaced to Cannes regretted that the comments of international critics did not mention Benito Pérez Galdós. They did not know him.

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