You could set fire to a thousand Bibles with the heat from Luis Bunuel’s cynicism. He’d been taking shots at the Catholic church for over thirty years at this point and he’s still at it here and with the seasoned skill of a world class filmmaker. He serves us his poison in a beautifully made cup. Bunuel is charitable to his lead character, nun Viridiana (Silvia Pinal), because she has a good heart which he respects—Bunuel hates the church, yet he knows that some earnest people swim in the lower ranks—but he’s also quick to take every good intention she has and flip it over violently. She has much more faith in people than Bunuel does. By the end of the film, after a series of strange and sexually charged episodes that occur when she visits her lonely distant uncle (Fernando Rey), the old Spaniard surrealist sets her straight.
Spanish censors requested several changes to the story and Bunuel somehow got away with not going along with any of them except for the ending, which he replaced with a piece of innuendo. Ultimately, Francisco Franco took great offense at the film and personally banned it in Spain, a decree which held until the dictator’s death about fifteen years later. For all its controversy, it took the top prize at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.