Orphan and rebel. Neither lover nor wife. Amputee and in search of an impossible emancipation. Tristana became one of the most unfortunate female characters of Benito Pérez Galdós, courtesy of his Marianela, his “Desheredada” or Fortunata, when at the end of the 19th century he published the novel that bore her name. Seven decades later, Luis Buñuel transformed her into frames. He gave her the face of Catherine Deneuve and moved the action from Madrid to Toledo.
With the making of the film by the Aragonese filmmaker, an “underground link” was created between Galdós and Buñuel that Miguel Marías analyzed this week at the El Greco Museum in Toledo. The legendary writer published it three years before the birth of the cinematographic master from Calanda.
The former director of the Spanish Cinematheque and the Institute of Cinematography and Visual Arts (ICAA) participated in the second edition of “El Greco in Front of the Big Screen”, which includes presentations and screenings.
Marías, who has never considered himself a film critic, even though he knows and disseminates the seventh art, explains to elDiarioclm.es who does not act as a literary critic with this newspaper either. But he considers that the emancipation of the character of Tristana is “more mental, internal and theoretical than real.”
In this novel, the protagonist, the “lame one” as Galdós calls her, when she becomes an orphan, is taken in by Don Lope, a friend of her family, who serves as her tutor but also tries to seduce her. While she rebels against this, the young woman gives in to her passion for Horacio, a painter who also does not accept Tristana’s feminist ideas.
But in search of freedom, and after losing a leg, the fate of the young woman makes her dependence fall irremediably into the hands of Don Lope. This is where Miguel Marías interprets her “free spirit” in theory, because “he comments more to Saturna, his confidante, than he protests to Don Lope.”
This is why he agrees with Buñuel that “Tristana” is not one of Galdós’ great novels but that it develops “very interesting” characters.
Toledo has changed less and it was easier to film simulating that era in Madrid
Perhaps this is what attracted the Aragonese filmmaker to the novel. But he found that the city of Madrid had changed a lot between 1892 and 1970. Miguel Marías explains that this is why many experts believe he chose Toledo. Its historic center, preserved over the centuries, was “less modified and it was easier to film simulating that era of Madrid.”
In particular, he also believes that Buñuel was above all “a lover of Toledo.” In this city he carried out his famous Order of Toledo, which also included Rafael Alberti, Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, and which, despite its solemn name, was essentially dedicated to collecting oral tradition and roaming the streets in search of adventure.
The Aragonese filmmaker had already broken the molds of cinematographic art. He was a champion of surrealism, which he then combined with stories inspired by realism.
How did you do with “Tristana”? “As almost always when Buñuel adapts a novel, he remains faithful to the general lines and introduces notable changes. Galdós’ “Tristana” is more innocent and the end of the novel is more positive than that of the film. In any case, this film was not the most surrealist of Buñuel’s films either.”
Miguel Marías also disagrees that Galdós is a model of realism or naturalism. “It seems much freer and bolder, more daring and modern, both with the chronology of the story and with the intervention of characters or narrators outside the plot or time. I think he is a novelist much more of the 20th century than of the 19th. And I believe that there is a certain underground connection with the profound surrealism of Buñuel,” he adds. He also explains that Buñuel’s time in Toledo has “fleeting traces” in his “Tristana”, which are reflected in the cafes or in the homes of “Don Lope’s friends”,
“But the film does not provide an opportunity to evoke the quasi-ritual weekends of the Order of Toledo, nor to evoke its conditions of admission or the categories among its members. There is no trace of the tendency to dress up as Buñuel, who apparently walked around the night of Toledo dressed as a ghost,” he emphasizes.
What this clearly shows is that this is Buñuel’s first “old man film.” He was only 70, but that was, at the time, “too old to be running insurance companies.”
“It has, on the one hand, an appearance of ease and simplicity that hides its depth and a deep sense of cinematic narration. There is also a contemporary sympathy for the noble and old-fashioned and somewhat subversive, offbeat and rebellious side of Don Lope, who, on the other hand, in his behavior with Tristana, is an aggressor clearly shown as such. “If it had been played by another actor than Fernando Rey, it could have been odious instead of ambiguous.”
Miguel Marías finds “much more humor” in Buñuel than in Galdós. It is a question of analyzing their different capacities, since it is recalled that neither literature and cinema are equivalent, nor were the two authors contemporaries.
However, he finally sees “a certain affinity” between the two, especially “in the use of imagination”; and also “in the deepening of the complex psychologies of the characters, and in the freedom with which they jumped from one point to another in the story.”
From 1892 to 1970
Galdós published “Tristana” in 1892, as part of the cycle “Contemporary Spanish Novels”. Although, as Miguel Marías says, it is not considered the best of his novels, the philosopher and essayist María Zambrano, emphasizes in her manual “La España de Galdós” that this book deserved to be “the unique work of an author”.
Buñuel’s “Tristana” was created in 1970 and was filmed in different locations in Toledo such as the Plaza de Zocodover, San Pedro Mártir, Santo Domingo el Real, the Paseo de Recaredo, the train station (now the AVE) or the Cigarral Loreto. It is not the only novel by Galdós that he has adapted: he has also done so with “Nazarín” and with “Halma”, the latter renamed “Viridiana” for the cinema and where a small Toledo setting also appears.
