Strange paths to empowerment in unholy Toledo

Tristana. “Triste Ana,” her lovesick lover-guardian intones. The name invokes sadness—la tristeza. Sadness is written into her name and her name is the film’s perfect enigmatic title. She is not its protagonist, at least not unambiguously. Tristana’s is a heroine’s journey, from near-destitution and naïveté, to humble salvation in the home—and, eventually, the bed—of an aging aristocrat thriftily managing a dwindling fortune, to rebellion, escape, illness, return, empowerment, revenge. Yet Tristana is held at a distance, an obscure object of desire who, unlike her lover-guardian, is not designed for our identification. Her mystery and malleability is one of the wonders of this beguiling story.

Luis Buñuel wanted to make Tristana (1970), adapted from Benito Pérez Galdós’ novel, for years, and at one point nearly did so, in Mexico, with Sylvia Pinal. He’d made Viridiana (1964), another seductive and strange female-name-title, and one of his greatest films, also from Pérez Galdós, with Pinal, in his native Spain, and it took a while for the Spanish to get over it, the delicious flights of blasphemy most especially. But by 1969 they decided to let him come home to work for one last time. He swapped the novel’s 19th century Madrid for 1920s Toledo, with a Spain on the cusp of Civil War, and a location more in keeping with the cloistered-in-time feeling he was chasing—the exteriors are mostly narrow cobbled streets loomed over by high walls with few windows. There are clashes between authorities and workers in these streets, but such activities barely touch the central narrative thread, another of Buñuel’s tales of amour fou. Fascinating, mischievous, elegant, anthropologically alluring—Buñuel was obsessed with recapturing numerous peculiar details of the quasi-medieval Spain of his youth—the long-difficult-to-see Tristana is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Cohen Media Group.

It begins with the newly orphaned Tristana’s adoption by the socialist-nobleman-ladies man Don Lope. Tristana is played by Catherine Deneuve in the second of her two collaborations with Buñuel, the first being Belle de jour (1967). She moves seamlessly from wide-eyed wonder to fiery resentment. (The only downside to Denueve’s casting is that her dialogue is overdubbed by some chirpy española; there’s a French version out there somewhere, but then you’ve got to put up with most of the rest of the cast being overdubbed by a bunch of Frenchmen.) Don Lope is played by the hopelessly charismatic Fernando Rey, providing Buñuel with another of his older gentlemen obsessed with younger women, variations of which can be found in, of course, Viridiana and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Don Lope is given to declaring his strict moral standards, but when he bends Tristana into becoming his lover he breaks his own rule about seducing the innocent. He will pay for this violation. Inevitably, even in a place as repressed as this, Tristana meets a young painter (Italian heartthrob Franco Nero) and they run off. She returns years later, with a tumor in her calf, and renews her codependency with Don Lope. Throughout the film, Tristana delights in choosing favourites amongst the most banal items: columns, streets, garbanzos. It’s a child’s game, a way of playing at self-determination, and thus, ultimately—when cancer forces Tristana to “choose” a leg—a source of cruel irony. Power in Tristana is precarious and fleeting. Don Lope with grow old and harmless; Tristana will become crippled yet domineering. In one of the film’s richest scenes she methodically exposes her abbreviated body to a deaf-mute boy: one social outcast finding her hierarchical place amongst other outcasts.

Cohen’s Tristana features several excellent supplements, including two written essays, a video essay, an audio commentary featuring Deneuve and critic Kent Jones, and, my personal favourite—since one must choose favourites—an excerpt from Deneuve’s production journal. 

Is This Desire?: Daniel Bergner takes readers for four illuminating walks on the wild side

There’s a school of ostensible common sense that tells us our sexuality is among the most banal aspects of our identities, but a modicum of experience tells us the particularities of individual desire can form the threshold of mystery, and of deeper understanding. You meet someone, you go to bed, you discover, to use a fairly common example, that they like it a little rough. Maybe a lot. How far do you follow their lead? Spanking? Choking? Bondage? Elaborately constructed rape scenarios? How dynamically does your desire tangle with theirs? Where does play end and perversion begin? How much of this is experimentation? How much is base need? What exactly is it that this person is chasing?

Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing (Ecco, $32.99) penetrates the labyrinth of human desire not with the intention of carefully mapping it out so as to make future travels through its terrain safer. This slim, engrossing collection of four essays is concerned rather with the varying ways we cope or even thrive with the strange desires that drive us, that sometimes compel us to feel guilt or keep secrets, that separate us from the comfort of social norms. Hard conclusions are few, but the book brims with insight and compassion. However, unless you share some of the unusual proclivities reported, I can’t promise you’ll find it sexy. In fact, some of it is positively alarming.

Jacob Miller is the most harmless and, sadly, most traumatized by conformity of all Bergner’s subjects. Jacob has his quirks. An American, he really, really likes Toronto, which he considers some utopia of social harmony. And Jacob really likes feet. I know, the Toronto thing seems weirder, but it’s the foot thing that messes him up. He can’t even listen to a weather report promising however many “feet” of snow without going orgasmic. And he feels ashamed of it. Bergner’s relentlessly inquisitive but also respectful of Jacob’s fetish and his difficulty in accepting it—something certain readers may lose their patience with. (Bergner also uses this first essay to lubricate things tonally. Within the first few pages we know we’re not in for anything overly clinical, not after Bergner’s casual use of terms like cock, fuck, and, my personal favourite, one that Bergner perhaps coined: “footcunt.”)

Baroness is the presumably self-designated moniker of Bergner’s second subject, a female sadist—apparently a real rarity—and successful clothing designer, though her recent work has been tailored exclusively for latex. She maintains a happy marriage to a guy with a ponytail and zero interest in getting a brutal beating while getting off. Her other life is rife with activities that many might have a hard time defining as sex at all. She recounts the time she had a guy slathered in honey and roasted on a spit. “I feel like God,” says Baroness. “There is a stillness when I’m about to use the bullwhip, or my wand if I’m about to set someone on fire. Have you ever watched an animal that is scared, caught in headlights or conscious of your presence... you can feel time stopping.” Baroness can be hard to take, but Bergner’s open-minded immersion into her populous milieu is fascinating.

The book’s longest essay, one which originated in The New York Times Magazine, for which Bergner is a staff writer, concerns Roy, a man convicted for molesting his stepdaughter. It is the book’s most controversial and troubling foray into abnormal sex, and in some regards its most vital. Roy is sympathetic. His actual crimes were relatively minimal. He’s nothing if not regretful, seeks therapy for his urges and is engaged to an adult woman with whom he’s open about his past. But Bergner, who has two children, questions how much he can trust Roy, while asking equally difficult questions about memory and innocence and how the nature of our sexual experiences change as we reflect on them. This essay ends with the book’s most eloquent and haunting image, one of Roy literally trapped on a fence as he attempts to flee a scenario that threatens to mirror the one that he claims first drew him into his longing for preadolescent flesh.

The fourth and final of Bergner’s essays is so good it’s worth the asking price alone—it even has a happy ending. It’s a love story, about Laura, a young woman who loses her legs in a car accident, and Ron, an older photographer resolved to the fact that he’s attracted to the disabled. Laura is Ron’s perfect woman: smart, cute and legless. The mind reels at the conclusions one can draw from such a kink—I immediately thought of something I read years ago about the inherent misogyny of Gauguin’s Polynesian women, with their absent/incomplete limbs. But Bergner addresses these concerns shrewdly and concisely, all the while stressing the polemical value of Ron’s erotic photographs of disabled women.

In each of Bergner’s essays, he shifts dexterously between the narratives of his central subjects and, just as interestingly, those working to better understand and treat their cases. Most often, Bergner finds the available theories to be in direct conflict, and a consistent debate concerning nature versus nurture lies at the heart of the matter. Bergner also draws upon art and literature to elucidate the stories he tells. He discusses Nabokov’s Lolita, of course, with regards to Roy, but also the life and work of Surrealist sculptor/photographer Hans Bellmer (author of the lead-off image) and German writer/artist Unica Zürn in relation to Ron. (I found myself wishing Bergner would also discuss J.G. Ballard’s infamous novel Crash, made into the equally infamous David Cronenberg film, which has often been criticized as absurdly grotesque for its proposed equation between accident and injury and eros—a proposal which resonates intensely with Ron and Laura’s story.) Through it all there is much to learn about things like gender difference, genetics and cultural conditioning, yet there’s also a subtextual analysis of something more fluid and elusive: the psyche’s unwillingness to go with the program. When it comes to our intimate lives, The Other Side of Desire proves that each of us is stubbornly unique, and yet none of us are beyond some contact with the sublime.