Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel's wicked and wild take on the
life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a
pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six
months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God. Yet
the devil, in the figure of the beautiful Silvia Pinal, huddles
below, trying to tempt him down. A skeptic s vision of human
conviction, Buñuel's short and sweet satire is one of the master
filmmaker's most renowned works of surrealism.
SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:
New, restored high-definition digital transfer
A Mexican Buñuel (1995), 50-minute documentary by Emilio Maillé
New interview with actress Silvia Pinal
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Wood and
a reprinted interview with Buñuel
.com
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Simon of the Desert, the last of Luis Buñuel's 20 Mexican films,
is one of the pioneer Surrealist's sublime provocations. In
Buñuel's re-imagining of the legend of St. Simeon Stylites--the
5th-century ascetic who passed 40 years atop a pillar in the
Syrian desert--we first encounter the holy man as he's upgrading
from his original modest pedestal to a 28-foot column six years,
six weeks, and six days (666!) into his desert solitude. Viewers
of Viridiana, Nazarín, and other Buñuel glosses on Catholicism
won't be surprised that dogma and piety get short shrift, or that
the saint's relentless self-abnegation is tinged with moral
superiority and a disdain for his fellow humans. Towering against
the sky (and towering all the more in the person of Claudio
Brook, the gaunt butler in The Exterminating Angel), Simón
heroically resists multiple temptations by
Beelzebub-as-blond-hottie (Silvia Pinal, the once and virginal
Viridiana) and such blackly comic distractions as exploding
frogs, the Devil's motorized coffin, and a dwarf goatherd
enamored of his flock. The film's triumph lies in the disarming
plainness of Buñuel's style, his masterly use of the spare
setting and an almost functional-seeming camera to locate
surreality in the mundane.
Simón's ritual ordeal ends abruptly in a wildly anachronistic
coda, a stroke as brilliant as it is zany ... though how much
that was Buñuel's original intention is open to question. The
picture runs a mere 45 minutes. In his memoir Buñuel says that
producer Gustavo Alatriste "ran into some unfortunate financial
problems ... and I had to cut a full half of the film."
Alternatively, in a 2006 interview conducted for this Criterion
release, Silvia Pinal cls that she and her producer-husband
Alatriste had the notion to make an omnibus film starring her in
all three short-story episodes: Buñuel's, plus a segment directed
by Federico Fellini, plus another by Jules Dassin. Then Fellini
and Dassin each proposed casting their actress-wives (Giulietta
Masina and Melina Mercouri, respectively) instead of Pinal, so
only Buñuel's episode got made. Whichever explanation is true,
Simon at 45 minutes is more movie than most films of conventional
length, and its unclassifiability as either feature or short
subject seems like yet another Buñuelian jest. (U.S. art-house
exhibitors in 1969 paired Simon with Orson Welles's 58-minute The
Immortal Story to create a viable feature-length program.)
Also on the disc
Filling out the Criterion disc is A Mexican Buñuel, an hourlong
1997 documentary focusing on the director's life in Mexico and
how he managed to do his unorthodox thing in that country's
commercial cinema from 1947 to 1965. Emilio Maillé's film
includes testimony from frequent screenwriting partner Luis
Alcoriza (Sancho Panza to Buñuel's Don Quixote, according to
Carlos Fuentes), editor Carlos Savage, and actors Roberto Cobo
(the horrific Jaibo in Los olvidados, quite delightful in old
age), Ernesto Alonso (Archibaldo de la Cruz), and Katy Jurado,
among others. All remember their director as "brusque but
cordial, always joking," and we hear how he demanded that the
great Gabriel Figueroa, cinematographer of Simon of the Desert
and other key Buñuel films, forgo the dramatic storm-sky style
for which he was celebrated. There are also passages with
Buñuel's wife of half a century (with whom he never talked about
his work) and clips from a '60s Buñuel interview conducted in
English ("I am the black humor!"). Alcoriza speaks of himself and
Buñuel as "atheists intrigued by religion," and the film is
framed by images of a 1997 attempt to recl Simón's column from
the peasant's field where it lay for 32 years, taking up ground
that might otherwise support "four or five stalks of corn."
--Richard T. Jameson
Stills from Simon of the Desert (Click for larger image)
( https://images-na.ssl-images-.com/images/G/01/dvd/image/simon/SimonDesert_2.jpg ) ( https://images-na.ssl-images-.com/images/G/01/dvd/image/simon/SimonDesert_3.jpg ) ( https://images-na.ssl-images-.com/images/G/01/dvd/image/simon/SimonDesert_4.jpg )
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Review
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Perfect filmmaking...Bunuel's wit is piercingly sharp, his timing
impeccable. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
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