After shocking the world with his early surrealist work, filmmaker Luis Buñuel dodged the oppressive control of Franco-era Spain by crafting a slew of landmark works in Mexico including Los Olvidados and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. His last three Mexican works have often been considered a trilogy of sorts, as they all star actress Silvia Pinal and were produced by her husband, Gustavo Alatriste (who later went on to marry Mexican horror star Ariadna Welter). All three of these films garner international acclaim and are considered among the director's most important work, setting the stage for his watershed French period that would more or less define the rest of his career. All three films have been available from quite some time from the Criterion Collection as well as Blu-rays in Spain and Japan, but in 2024, Radiance Films delivered the best editions by a long shot in their stacked Blu-ray set, Nothing Is Sacred: Three Heresies by Luis Buñuel, featuring greatly improved transfers of each film.

First up is the wildly controversial Viridiana, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was officially a co-production with Spain (where it was shot around Madrid) who promptly banned the film until 1977 and tried to have it completely destroyed. Rife with suggestive sexual, violent, and blasphemous imagery but also very funny, the story charts the Sade-worthy experiences of a nun in training, Viridiana (Pinal), who's sent before taking her final vows to visit her only relative, the widowed Don Jaime (frequent Buñuel star Rey). Her stay turns into a life-changing one as he drugs her into a bizarre evening replicating the death of his wife on their wedding night, and through macabre circumstances, she inherits half his estate with the rest going to her cousin, Jorge (Dagon's Rabal). That leads to an odd living arrangement with housekeeper Ramona (Lozano) and Jorge's girlfriend, Lucia (Zinny), as Viridiana tries to find a new way to help the needy in her own way.

A startling film even by today's standards, Viridiana marked a sharp shift in the filmmaker's approach compared to his previous religious satire, Nazarín, which is well done but doesn't go nearly as far as the implications of rape, necrophilia, and orgies found here -- not to mention the infamous climactic moment with a houseful of beggars restaging the last supper. All three of the leads have long cemented their reputations as world class thespians, with Rey brought in here as part of the Spanish financing and already demonstrating why the director would keep going back to him (including a variation on this role in the later Tristana).

This has been a fairly easy film to see over the years, with home video releases including a late '80s VHS from Hens Tooth and numerous DVD editions in Europe. A restored transfer with optional English subtitles appeared from Criterion in 2006 with extras including interviews with Silvia Pinal (14m24s) and author Richard Porton (12m39s), excerpts from a 1964 episode of Cinèastes de notre temps (37m23s) on Buñuel's early career, and the American trailer, plus liner notes by Michael Wood. The Radiance Blu-ray comes from a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative, and it looks beautiful with more image info in the frame, richer black levels, greatly improved detail, and a lot less damage (including no more scratches running throughout the first reel like the previous releases). The optional English subtitles are also greatly improved and the LPCM 1.0 Spanish mono audio is excellent, as with the other two titles in the set. Extras here kick off with the 1983 BBC Arena documentary The Life and Times of Don Luis Buñuel (101m17s) featuring interviews with Buñuel and collaborators including Catherine Deneuve, with an optional 9m40s intro by Anthony Wall. It's a thorough overview of his life and career across multiple continents with a generous amount of film clips that will make you want to program your own mini-festival. Director Lulu Wang provides a new 10m56s appraisal of the film including its impact on later filmmakers and its subversive take on male-female relationships, and you get a significantly longer version of that episode of Cinéastes de notre temps, now clocking in at 47m46s. A gallery of stills and posters is also included. The film itself comes with a thorough new audio commentary by Michael Brooke who goes into the film's pivotal exposure on British TV in the '80s, the filming locations, backgrounds of the significant actors, the subversion of viewer expectations at play (especially if you know the director), the effective "crepuscular" lighting and gothic imagery, the naughty meaning of the final scene, and a slew of cultural and artistic references and connections you could easily miss.

The following year, Buñuel struck again with the film that brought him closest to the horror genre (and actually falls within it according to more than a few lists over the years): The Exterminating Angel, one of his darkly comic takedowns of the upper class who end up stuck in a situation of their own making (later tweaked into his Oscar-winning classic, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). Encountering far fewer censorship issues since it skewers class and governmental behavior directly rather than religious (well, mostly), it became an art house success in numerous countries and has since been referenced and imitated numerous times. The concept here superficially could be a Twilight Zone episode as twenty friends gather for a dinner party at the home of the well-to-do Edmundo and Lucía Nóbile (Rambal and Gallardo). All of the servants are extremely eager to leave and depart by the time the festivities start, and as the evening wears on, all the attendees find themselves utterly unable to leave. When one of the servants, Julio (Brook), returns the following morning, he also becomes trapped as death, inexplicable conversational glitches, multiple animals, and a massive crowd building outside turn the situation into a comic nightmare.

Considering how much of this film takes place in a single setting, it's remarkable how spry and engaging the execution is here with the more shocking elements woven in so gradually that the eventual erosion of civilization feels totally convincing. The surrealism is here more conceptual than visual for the most part, with the simple situation metastasizing into a chilling portrait of how a dysfunctional situation can build past the boundaries society has set up for itself. It isn't a simple anti-rich statement but more of a dispassionate look at how we all build up facades to keep us safe that can ultimately backfire horrifically. You also get the chance to see a great collection of Mexican actors in their prime here, with Pinal back here as the pivotal voice of reason Leticia and the wonderful Brook shining in one of his earliest major roles.

The Exterminating Angel has also had an extensive and healthy home video history since the VHS days, though early transfers were unwatchable as they were taken from ratty prints with blown-out white subtitles that were mostly illegible. The first genuinely good-looking release came on DVD from Criterion in 2009, followed by a very nice quality Blu-ray in 2016 from the same label with extras including the Spanish-language subtitled trailer, a 10m18s interview with Pinal (including some funny memories of what would happen when she asked "why" things were happening), a 15-minute interview with director Arturo Ripstein on the film's influence, and The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel (97m4s), a 2008 documentary featuring screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and filmmaker Juan Luis Buñuel chatting about the director's life and impact. The insert booklet features an essay by Michael Wood and an archival Buñuel interview. The Radiance cites its presentation as being from a 4K scan by Radiance Films, and it appears to be from the same film source as the earlier release but with a bit more image info, stronger black levels, and better detail. Most significantly, a few tiny visual elements like glinting light reflects that appear to have been scrubbed off the earlier Blu-ray during the noise reduction process are intact here. Extras include 1995's A Mexican Buñuel (55m41s), a standard definition documentary by Emilio Maillé about the filmmaker's lengthy period in Mexico ranging from major realist works like Los Olvidados to his groundbreaking surrealist masterpieces, an appreciative intro by Alex Cox (9m39s), and an interview with Guillermo Del Toro (18m55s), who cast Brook in his debut film Cronos, about the film's effect on him and its use of horror elements. Also included are a production photo gallery and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' video essay "Dinner and Other Rituals" (16m52s) about the depiction of meal eating and its related social customs as elements of the director's work.

Capping things off on disc three in the set is the Simon of the Desert, a 1965 short film that was programmed with feature-length arthouse titles numerous times and, according to Pinal, was intended to be part of a three-story anthology that never materialized. It would certainly have made a great companion piece with Pier Paolo Pasolini's contribution to RoGoPaG had it been made a little later, as this is one of the wildest and most memorable of Buñuel's religious satires. Brook gets full starring duties here as Simón, who has rejected all earthly indulgences and lived atop a pillar in the desert for six years. Regular religious visitors of various kinds visit him and provide his basic needs to survive, and in return for performing a miraculous act of healing, he's offered the chance to reposition himself to a loftier location. Various temptations and conflicts soon emerge with Simón tempted by various incarnations of Satan (Pinal), which leads to more physical and spiritual challenges that transcend time itself.

Buñuel himself once claimed that this was intended to be a full-length feature on its own, but whatever the situation may really be, this is another one that's very much open to interpretation including an audacious finale that still divides opinion. Almost unrecognizable here for most of the running time, Brook is highly effective here in a character more or less inspired by a real ascetic, the Syrian saint Simón Stylites, who was claimed to have survived for over three decades on a similar pillar. The execution though is pure Buñuel with its depiction of how the wealthy class handles the refusal of material rewards, even when it's within the framework of piety that organized religion needs to survive.

Despite its short length, this film has been released several times as a standalone home video release with a treatment usually suited for standard feature films. Criterion issued a DVD special edition in 2009 and hasn't revisited it since, with extras including that A Mexican Buñuel documentary and an interview with Pinal (6m39s) about the film's anthology beginnings and its tumultuous role in ending the triple creative lineup involving her husband. Also included is an insert with notes by Wood and an interview with the director. Like the other two features here, this one was issued on Blu-ray in Japan and Spain, but the big revelation with the Radiance Blu-ray is just how severely cropped and compromised all the past transfers were. The prior Blu-rays in particular hacked off a huge portion of info from the bottom and left sides, and the new 4K restoration here is the biggest leap of them all with a colossal increase in detail and the most image info to date by a wide margin. It really looks terrific and is worth the upgrade all by itself. Here on the Radiance disc you get a new appreciation from filmmaker and actor Richard Ayoade (14m55s) about why this is one of his favorites of the director's work, the 2021 documentary Buñuel: A Surrealist Filmmaker (87m8s) by Javier Espada offering a fresh overview of his life and career with a focus on the evolution of his artistic sensibilities post-Dali and through Spain, Mexico, and France, and "The Other Trinity: Alatriste, Buñuel and Pinal" (32m35s), a visual essay by Abraham Castillo Flores about the limited but highly creative and important collaboration between the star, actor, and producer in this period of just a few years. The box also comes with a limited edition 80-page book featuring new essays by Glenn Kenny, Justine Smith, Lindsay Hallam and David Hering, plus archival material.

VIRIDIANA: Radiance (Blu-ray)

VIRIDIANA: Criterion (DVD)

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL: Radiance (Blu-ray)

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL: Criterion (Blu-ray)

SIMON OF THE DESERT: Radiance (Blu-ray)

SIMON OF THE DESERT: Divisa (Blu-ray)

SIMON OF THE DESERT: Criterion (DVD)

Reviewed on December 25, 2024