Based on the 1895 novel by Benito Perez Galdos and often considered one of the greatest films in Luis Buñuel’s Mexican period, Nazarin invests the picaresque wandering of post-war cinema with a mystical Catholic bent. The drifters of neorealism were already suffused with a kind of mad holiness, as evinced in Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan and Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis, which both extend the troupes and vagrants of their classical eras into a more religious iconography. Buñuel is far more sceptical about religion than either of those two directors, and yet his doubt is precisely what allows him to commune with Father Nazario, played by Francisco Nabal, the priest at the heart of his vision. In Monsignor Quixote, one of his final novels, Graham Greene draws on another great Spanish novelist, Miguel de Cervantes, to set up a dialogue between a Catholic and a Marxist, both of whom come to realise “how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together perhaps even more than sharing a faith. The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference: the doubter fights only with himself.” Something of that communion of doubt exists between Buñuel and Nazaro here, blending their two sensibilities into an eccentric mélange in which the priest’s sanctity presents as countercultural liberalism, or even radical socialism, to his more orthodox colleagues.
Yet to speak of colleagues is perhaps a bit inaccurate for this film, since Nazario is never connected in any meaningful way to the Catholic church, or to any social institutions. He eschews even the most basic tenets of private property, rarely using his front door and instead encouraging, or at least allowing, anybody to step in through his commodious front window, which doesn’t have a pane, let alone a lock, whenever they choose. In other words, he embodies Buñuel’s critique of capitalism, arguing for charity over property, translating Marx’s mantra of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” into a Catholic register: “To me nothing belongs to anyone, everything is for whoever needs it first.” Nazario refuses to recognize social class, telling one of his flock that “I speak in low and familiar tones to those who want to listen,” which causes considerable consternation from the judico-religious establishment: “Do you believe that a priest’s dignity is incompatible with a beggar’s humiliation?” Of course, since this is Buñuel, Nazarin is not merely pious: there are strains of perversion interleaved with the sanctity, most of them bound up with the two women, Beatriz, played by Marga Lopa, and Andara, played by Rita Macedo, who attach themselves to him. Beatriz, psychotic and fleeing an abusive husband, is the Madonna figure of the film, whereas Andara, a sex worker who has murdered another sex worker in self-defence, is the Magdalene figure, and together they warp and bend the textures of Nazario’s sanctity, whether through Beatriz’s distorted flashbacks to her partner and hallucinations of an icon of Christ laughing at her, or Andara’s absurd questions, culminating with the issue of how the Church manages payments for spiritual favours.
Nevertheless, these absurdities don’t annul Nazario’s mission so much as provide the dissonanced needed for his faith and doubt to commune with each other. By drawing on Buñuel’s own surreal signature, they also create space for the communion of doubt that drives the film, which at heart is about the impossibility of recognising a modern saint – a thought-experiment in what it would take for someone in the modern world to demonstrate truly saintly qualities, whether Christian or Marxist. This question propels the second half of the film, which leaves the constrictions of Nazario’s apartment, and the neighborhood drama around it, as the three main characters flee the authorities and make their way on the road as beggars. The peripatetic spirit of post-war cinema now comes to the fore, as the trio move from place to place, and from experience to experience, giving Buñuel free rein for the kinds of cinematic vignettes he does so well. For, in its own way, this is as much a vignette film, a compendium of shorts, as The Phantom of Liberty or That Obscure Object of Desire; it may be in a lower key, but it’s a critical precursor to Buñuel’s late style. Most of these vignettes involve people misinterpreting, misrepresenting or attempting to extort miracles from Nazario, but that common thread doesn’t fully capture their exquisite individual beauty or strangeness, the different modalities with which they manage to leave us suspended in the absurd yet sublime spaces between faith and doubt.
Among other things, these vignettes capture Buñuel’s gift for movement, for the rhythms of the road. In one of them, Nazario is speaking to a colonel as a farmer walks by and, outraged by the farmer’s apparent disrespect, the colonel makes him come back and greet the two of them with proper “dignity,” a privilege that the priest quickly rejects. Likewise, the spirit of the road infuses Andara’s relationship with a little man who manically runs with her and around her, forcing her to accelerate her pace in turn, and forming an odd couple that mirrors the rapport between Nazarin and Buñuel themselves. Occasionally these vignettes lapse into a more recognisable surrealism, such as a dying woman who prefers her husband’s last rites, based on the Marquis de Sade’s Dialogue Between a Priest and Dying Man, to those of Nazarin. But for the most part they remain in this same exquisitely absurd yet plangent zone between faith and doubt, culminating with the centrepiece of the film – a village struck by the plague, where Nazario is eventually captured, and where he has his Gethsemane-like crisis of faith on the night before being marched back to the capital. It is here, too, that he is chastised and his crimes enumerated by the religious establishment: “At least you recognize your imprudences, all your crazy acts…they’re right to say you are a noncomformist…it will be difficult for you to readjust to reality, to make you see your actions are contradictory to a priest’s and insult the church you claim to love and obey.”
Appropriately, though, the film ends on the road, but this time with Nazario being marched back to the city to stand trial for his heterodoxy and his supposed carnal relations with Beatriz and Andara, even as Beatriz returns to her toxic abuser in a restoration of patriarchal realism. In one last plangent vignette, a peasant woman passes Nazario on the road and offers him a gift of food, with the missive “Take this charity and may God keep you company.” In prison the night before, Nazario found it difficult to forgive a man who struck him, and now he twice refuses the gift, as his crisis of faith peaks around forgiveness and charity, the two pinnacles of his Christ-like mission. But eventually he relents, takes the food, tells the woman “May God pay you back ma’am” and continues along the road. This would already be a striking scene on its own terms but the fact that the woman presents him with a pineapple, symbol of hospitality on the one hand and yet so extravagantly incongruous in this parched mise-en-scene on the other, invests these final moments with a surfeit of signification that leaves the final, extended close-up of Nazario’s face suspended in the same space between faith that has characterized the entire film, in what amounts to one of the most exquisite modulated and beautifully emergent endings of Buñuel’s career.