Nazarín

Snapshot

Nazarín is Luis Buñuel's austere, corrosive parable of a priest who tries to live the Gospel literally and is defeated by the world he means to save. Adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós's 1895 novel and transplanted from Spain to the Mexico of the Porfiriato (the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, roughly the turn of the twentieth century), it follows Father Nazario — a poor, unworldly cleric played by Francisco Rabal — as he gives away what little he has, shelters a fugitive prostitute, and is finally cast out onto the road as a wandering mendicant. Two women attach themselves to him as disciples; a chain of small catastrophes follows in his wake. Made deep inside Buñuel's long Mexican exile, the film is at once his most restrained and one of his most philosophically loaded works: a study of Christian charity pushed to its logical extreme, where sanctity and social ruin become indistinguishable. It won the International Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and stands as the first panel of the loose trilogy on grace and its impossibility that continues in Viridiana (1961) and Simón del desierto (1965).

Industry & production

Nazarín belongs to Buñuel's Mexican period, the extraordinary run of commercial and personal films he made after settling in Mexico City in the late 1940s following years of professional limbo. By 1958 he was an established, efficient director within the Mexican studio system, capable of shooting quickly and cheaply on tight schedules. The film was produced by Manuel Barbachano Ponce, a producer associated with more ambitious, artistically minded Mexican projects than the standard studio melodrama, which gave Buñuel latitude to pursue difficult material. Production was based in the Mexican studio apparatus centered on Estudios Churubusco, with location work supplying the dusty villages, roads, and construction sites that give the film its documentary-inflected texture.

The project sits at the meeting point of Buñuel's two working modes: the disciplined studio craftsman and the surrealist provocateur. Galdós — a canonical nineteenth-century Spanish novelist whom Buñuel admired and returned to again in Tristana (1970) — supplied a respectable literary source that could pass censorship and attract backing, while allowing Buñuel to smuggle in his lifelong anticlericalism and his skepticism about religious idealism. The screenplay is credited to Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, the Spanish playwright who became one of his most important Mexican-period collaborators. Budgets and grosses for the film are not reliably documented in the standard English-language sources, and I won't invent them; what is clear is that this was a modestly scaled production whose prestige came from Cannes rather than from the box office.

Technology

Nazarín was shot on 35mm black-and-white film in the standard Academy aspect ratio, with monaural optical sound — the conventional technical package of a late-1950s Mexican studio feature. There is nothing technologically experimental about the film; Buñuel's interest lay in the plainest possible means. The black-and-white stock and Academy frame were by then slightly old-fashioned choices relative to the widescreen color spectaculars dominating international markets, and that plainness is expressive: the film's stripped-down materiality matches its subject. The most distinctive "technology" in the film is arguably pre-cinematic — the sound of the ceremonial drums of Calanda, the Good Friday drum ritual of Buñuel's Aragonese birthplace, whose relentless percussion he had used before and would use again, and which erupts on the soundtrack at the close.

Technique

Cinematography

The photography is by Gabriel Figueroa, the towering Mexican cinematographer whose deep-focus, sculpturally lit compositions and vast skies had defined the "golden age" look of Mexican cinema in his work with Emilio Fernández. Buñuel and Figueroa had a productive, sometimes friction-laden partnership precisely because Buñuel resisted Figueroa's instinct toward the beautiful. In Nazarín the imagery is deliberately less operatic than Figueroa's Fernández work: fewer monumental cloudscapes, more grinding, dust-level observation of poverty. Where the frame does turn overtly composed — the tableau-like arrangements of figures, the odd surrealist intrusion — it is usually to unsettle rather than to ennoble. The result is a photographic register held in tension between Figueroa's native lyricism and Buffuel's ascetic pull toward the flat and unadorned.

Editing

The cutting, by Carlos Savage (a frequent Buñuel editor in this period), is functional and unshowy, in keeping with Buñuel's famous dislike of virtuoso technique. Buñuel constructs meaning through juxtaposition of incident rather than through montage flourish: episodes are laid end to end in a picaresque chain, each self-contained, so that the film accrues its argument cumulatively. The editing rhythm is even and observational, refusing the emotional underlining that conventional continuity cutting supplies; this deadpan neutrality is central to the film's irony.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Buñuel stages Nazarín as a road film organized around a series of encounters, each dramatizing a collision between Nazario's absolute charity and the interests of the ordinary world. The staging favors the unglamorous middle distance and the crowded, incident-filled frame — sickrooms, jail cells, work sites, village streets. Objects and gestures carry the surrealist charge that the smooth surface otherwise suppresses: the sudden, inexplicable images and fetishized details that erupt into an ostensibly realist fabric are pure Buñuel. His mise-en-scène refuses to console; even scenes of tenderness are framed so that their futility or ambiguity remains visible.

Sound

The soundtrack is notably spare. Buñuel disliked wall-to-wall scoring and, as in much of his work, leaves long stretches carried by ambient and diegetic sound. The single most powerful sonic gesture is the intrusion of the Calanda drums over the final sequence — a non-diegetic pulse that swells as Nazario walks on, transforming a quiet human exchange into something overwhelming. Precise music credits for the film are not something I can confirm from memory with confidence, and I won't attribute a score falsely; what matters dramatically is the drum, deployed as an almost physical force rather than as melody.

Performance

Francisco Rabal, in the first of his collaborations with Buñuel (he would return in Viridiana and Belle de jour), plays Nazario with a grave, still interiority. He resists the obvious hagiographic notes: his Nazario is gentle, stubborn, occasionally obtuse, and finally shaken — a man whose goodness is real but whose comprehension of the world is fatally incomplete. Around him, Rita Macedo plays Andara, the violent, earthy prostitute whose crime sets the plot in motion, and Marga López plays Beatriz, the jilted, hysteria-prone woman drawn to Nazario with an ardor that is not entirely spiritual. Both women complicate the film's saintliness by loving Nazario in ways that are confused, possessive, and human. Ignacio López Tarso has a memorable turn as a sacrilegious prisoner whose blunt worldliness rebukes Nazario's faith, and Jesús Fernández appears as the dwarf Ujo, whose hopeless devotion to Andara supplies one of the film's tenderest and strangest threads.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film's mode is picaresque and episodic, closer to Don Quixote than to the well-made drama — and the Quixote parallel is deliberate, Nazario being a holy fool whose ideals shatter against reality exactly as the knight's do. Structurally it is a road narrative: expelled from his lodging after Andara, hiding from the law, burns it, Nazario takes to the highways as a beggar-pilgrim, trailed by his two would-be disciples. Each stop stages a moral experiment. In one, he offers to work for free out of charity and so undercuts the paid laborers, provoking a brawl — charity itself becomes socially destructive. In another, tending the victims of a typhus epidemic, he is helpless before death. In a devastating scene, a dying woman rejects the consolation of heaven and cries only for her earthly lover — a wholly Buñuelian refusal of religious comfort. The dramatic engine is irony: every attempt at pure good produces harm, humiliation, or indifference, and the narrative withholds any redemptive resolution.

Genre & cycle

Nominally a religious drama and a literary adaptation, Nazarín is better understood as an anticlerical philosophical fable in realist dress. It belongs to a recognizable cycle within Buñuel's own filmography — the sustained interrogation of Catholic sanctity that runs through Nazarín, Viridiana, and Simón del desierto, each testing a figure who tries to embody Christian virtue and each ending in failure, absurdity, or worldly defeat. Within Mexican cinema it can be read against the grain of the pious religious melodramas of the period, whose conventions it invokes only to dismantle. It is also, in its road structure and its ironic view of a delusional idealist, a distant cousin of the Quixotic tradition in Spanish-language art.

Authorship & method

Nazarín is a signature Buñuel work despite its literary source and its studio origins. Buñuel's method here is one of surface restraint concealing subversive intent: he lets a respectable Galdós novel and a competent commercial crew carry material that is, at its core, a demolition of religious idealism. His key collaborators are essential to the effect. Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa supplies a visual grandeur that Buñuel deliberately curbs, producing the film's characteristic tension between beauty and austerity. Screenwriter Julio Alejandro helped Buñuel shape Galdós into a taut episodic structure and would remain a crucial partner through Viridiana, Simón del desierto, and Tristana. Editor Carlos Savage gives the film its cool, unemphatic rhythm. Buñuel's own authorial fingerprints are unmistakable: the anticlericalism, the surrealist eruptions within realist scenes, the fetishized objects, the refusal of catharsis, and the famous ambiguity of the ending, which he seeded so that neither believer nor atheist could claim an easy victory.

Movement / national cinema

The film stands at the intersection of two traditions. It is a product of Mexican cinema — its crew, studios, landscapes, and its greatest cinematographer are all Mexican, and it carries the technical polish of that industry's golden age. But it is equally a work of the displaced Spanish surrealist, Buñuel, whose sensibility was forged in the 1920s avant-garde alongside Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'or. Nazarín is thus a hybrid: Mexican in body, Buñuelian and Spanish in spirit, adapting a canonical Spanish novel about faith and poverty. It marks a moment when Buñuel's Mexican-period craftsmanship and his surrealist-anticlerical convictions fused into fully achieved art cinema, positioning him for the international auteur recognition that would define his final European decades.

Era / period

Produced in 1958–59, Nazarín arrives as international cinema was turning toward the modernist auteur — the years of the French New Wave's emergence and the rising prestige of festival cinema. Its Cannes prize belongs to that shifting landscape, in which a director's personal vision and philosophical ambition were becoming the coin of critical value. The film also comes near the end of Buñuel's most prolific Mexican stretch and just before his triumphant, scandal-courting return to European production. Diegetically, it is set decades earlier, in the impoverished Mexico of the Díaz dictatorship, a world of epidemics, prisons, day-laborers, and beggars that Buñuel renders with unsentimental specificity.

Themes

The film's governing theme is the impossibility — or the social danger — of literal Christian charity in a fallen world. Nazario embodies the Gospel without compromise, and the film patiently demonstrates that pure goodness, unaccompanied by understanding of the world's mechanisms, produces disorder: it undercuts wages, attracts exploitation, inspires false miracles, and leaves suffering untouched. Buñuel's abiding anticlericalism runs beneath this, but the film is more interrogation than polemic; it takes Nazario's sincerity seriously even as it dismantles his premises. Related themes proliferate: the confusion of spiritual and erotic devotion in the two women; the rejection of heavenly consolation for earthly love; the parallel between saint and madman, Christ figure and Don Quixote. The celebrated ending — in which Nazario, marched along as a prisoner, is offered a pineapple by a stranger and, after hesitation, accepts it as the drums thunder — is deliberately open. It has been read as a crack in his faith, an awakening to purely human solidarity, or a first stirring of pride; Buñuel constructed it to resist any single reading.

Reception, canon & influence

Nazarín was received as a major work on the festival circuit, winning the International Prize at Cannes in 1959 and consolidating Buñuel's reputation as a serious artist rather than a genre journeyman. A well-known irony of its reception is that some Catholic observers were tempted to embrace it as a devout film — Buñuel, an unrepentant unbeliever, was reportedly bemused by the prospect of ecclesiastical honors for a work he intended as a critique. (The precise institutional details of that episode vary across accounts, so I'll flag the record as somewhat anecdotal.)

Backward, the film draws on Galdós's realist novel, on the Quixotic tradition of the deluded idealist, on Buñuel's own surrealist formation, and on the visual grammar of Mexican golden-age cinema embodied by Figueroa. Forward, its influence is felt most directly within Buñuel's own subsequent career: Nazarín opens the sequence of films on failed sanctity that culminates in the Palme d'Or–winning Viridiana and the mordant Simón del desierto, and it inaugurated the collaborations (with Julio Alejandro, and with Rabal) that shaped his late masterpieces. More broadly it belongs to the modern lineage of films that treat holiness as a problem rather than a comfort — a lineage that runs through the spiritually severe art cinema of the following decades. It has been admired by later filmmakers drawn to Buñuel's fusion of realism and the irrational; the frequently cited esteem of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky for Buñuel's work speaks to that reach, though specific attributions should be treated with the caution any secondhand quotation deserves. Today Nazarín is firmly canonized as one of the essential achievements of Buñuel's Mexican years and a keystone of his lifelong meditation on faith, charity, and their limits.