Viridiana (Preview)
Reviewed by David Heslin

Produced by Gustavo Alatriste; directed by Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Julio Alejandro; cinematography by José F. Aguayo; edited by Pedro del Rey; musical direction by Gustavo Pittaluga; starring Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Margarita Lozano, Victoria Zinny, and Teresita Rabal. A 4K UHD + Blu-ray combo edition, Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, B&W, 91 min.,1961. A Criterion Collection release.

In July 2024, a fun-house mirror was held up to the past: two hours into the TV broadcast of a typically ostentatious Summer Olympics opening ceremony, a posse of fashionistas, some in drag, briefly posed behind a catwalk in a loose pastiche of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The incorporation of the tableau—long ago reduced to cliché by the advertising industry and popular entertainment—was thoroughly unremarkable, but the backlash was fierce: conservative politicians and religious leaders around the world decried the segment, characterizing it as an insult to Christians, and even evidence of a satanic agenda.

No doubt for its principal agitators, this response had a good deal less to do with bruised piety than with the political opportunity it presented for the global far right’s current fixation on gender variance. But no matter how transparently cynical their denunciations, it was hard to miss the echoes of the controversy that, sixty-three years previously, had greeted another supposed act of desecration: the Cannes debut of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961). There, too, a re-creation of “The Last Supper”—this time with homeless men in the place of Jesus Christ and his apostles—was at the center of a furious international media and governmental response, leading to censors making cuts in Belgium and Switzerland; an in-absentia arrest warrant being issued for the director in Italy; and the film negative being burned in Spain, its country of production, where the film was not merely banned in the years that followed but, as executive producer Pere Portabella puts it, “erased…into oblivion.”

Perhaps it says something about this era’s prevailing cultural and artistic values that a playful, essentially meaningless invocation in 2024 was sufficient to replicate the effect of a film from a supposedly innocent era, when implication ruled and censors were far more unforgiving. There’s certainly no question that the battlefields have shifted, and that there is plenty of noncinematic media space to be sifted through nowadays for those looking for provocation. But while its age and absence from the zeitgeist will presumably continue to protect Viridiana from today’s Christian nationalists—or their own delicate sensibilities from its perceived offenses—the passing of time has in no way blunted the film’s acidity, nor its disregard for pieties beyond the spiritual. However you take it, Viridiana is no easy pill to swallow.

It’s into this timid new world that a new 4K digital restoration of Viridiana is making its North American debut on disc, a little over a year after appearing as a package deal with The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Simon of the Desert (1965) from U.K. distributor Radiance Films. That box set carried the somewhat emphatic title “Nothing Is Sacred: Three Heresies by Luis Buñuel,” and the profane nature of Viridiana is similarly a focus of The Criterion Collection’s new edition, which ports across the special features that appeared on their original 2006 DVD release, including interviews with star Silvia Pinal and Cineaste co-editor Richard Porton; a near-contemporaneous episode of the French TV show Cinéastes de notre temps, in which Buñuel himself features prominently; a booklet essay by Michael Wood; and an extensive interview with the director conducted by José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, originally published in their 1986 book Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel.

This last text features particularly fascinating insights into the film. Although Buñuel perhaps somewhat facetiously defends the most sacrilegious images in Viridiana—he points out, regarding the climactic shot of the burning crown of thorns, that “old liturgical objects are usually burned,” and suggests that the beggars adopt the poses of “The Last Supper” “by chance”—there is much serious insight to be found in his responses here, along with illuminating anecdotes from the shoot and explanations of references found in the film. Perhaps most tellingly, he confesses that while he expected the film to cause a scandal in Spain, he was nonetheless taken aback by its suppression.

When revisiting Viridiana via Criterion’s updated presentation, it’s easy to recognize the film as a provocation—but to what end? A superficial account of Buñuel’s motivations would be that as a self-proclaimed atheist working during a time when the label was more of an indictment than an identity, he was taking the responsibility of leading the charge against Christianity’s sacred cows—as, indeed, he had done from the sight of priests being dragged by ropes in Un chien andalou (1929) to the superimposition of a Sadean libertine on the figure of Christ at the conclusion of L’âge d’or (1930), all the way through to the bishop who shoots a man dead after giving him his last sacraments in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Anticlerical imagery was never far away in Buñuel’s work. But it was also not for nothing that he was referred to by collaborators and fellow filmmakers as “one of the most religious of men” and “a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can,” and it is in Viridiana that these contradictory impulses are particularly apparent…

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David Heslin is an Australian film critic who has written for Senses of Cinema, Metro, and ScreenHub.

Copyright © 2026 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 3