“There goes Don Quichote and his two Sanchos.”
(Buñuel on Nazario and his followers)
Nazarín, is a baffling film for a number of reasons. At first glimpse it is one of Buñuel’s most simple and accessible films, but beneath the surface lies a complex critique of the church and pastoral ethics that leads to more provocative conversation than much of his more avant-garde work. His more surreal films create their own logic, becoming formal rehearsals of moral anxiety in a closed circuit of reference. In contrast, Nazarín, is substantially connected to historical and political circumstances that exist outside of Buñuel’s frantic imagination. The second reason is that the film is probably even more relevant today than it was then. Nazarín is a meditation on ethics and justice only recently explored en masse by Christian theology on both sides of the Atlantic. A third reason is that many reviews of Nazarín see a restoration of its main character at the end of the film, its priest moving through doubt to a renewed faith in grace. I am not sure if the ambiguity of its finale is as charitable as many seem to take it. Nazarín was later awarded a prize by the US National Catholic film office, and Buñuel’s conflicted response to this award is probably indicative of how we should respond to the film.
Father Nazario is a Mexican priest during the awful days of Porfirio Diaz that has chosen a slum for a parish. Though the local prostitutes and thieves often steal what little he has, he is still present to offer the occasional mass and talk about matters of faith with whoever has ears to hear. In what I couldn’t help but take as a wry allusion to the gospel description of Jesus as the gate for the sheep, his visitors always come through an arched window that opens to the street rather than up the stairs to his door – Nazario constantly aware of his unorthodox, yet Christ-like relationship to his unwitting parishioners. The film’s second act begins when Nazario secretly harbors a prostitute that has murdered another woman in the street, who then burns everything in his house to cover her tracks when the jig is up. Having become complicit in her crime, Nazario is counseled to leave town under the guise of pilgrimage. A few towns down the road, he encounters the woman he protected as well as another suicidal prostitute from his old parish. They begin to follow him as disciples drawn by his saintly piety. Though these disciples are later misconstrued by officials as lovers, Buñuel does little to draw a distinction between faith and eros. They are a soap-opera Mary and Martha to his caricature of Jesus.
Along the way, all of Nazario’s attempts to minister to those around him end in tragedy. A boss is forced to shoot at his employees when he leaves a job site, a dying woman asks for her lover rather than last rites, his attempt to restore his two companions is condemned by the Church as adulterous. In effect, he leaves every pastoral situation worse than he found it, Nazario becoming the butt of Nazarín‘s extended absurdist joke about the Catholic church. Nazario is eventually betrayed by a miniature Judas and taken into custody, and the film ends in his chain-gang journey to trial for crimes committed. It lacks Buñuel’s typical visual flourishes, but it may be that the very form of Jesus in Nazario’s character, disturbing every situation he enters with his unbalancing ethical logic, is surreal enough. Many of Nazario’s scenes echo similar stories in the Gospels, Buñuel only teasing out the possible surreality of their moral implications like Jesus’ parables through the looking glass.
The last frames of Nazarín belong to a great sub-category of film conclusions that includes Slow Motion, Heartbeat Detector, Code Unknown, or The Visitor – all of which vanish in a thunder of percussion. This is the opposite of what happens in In the Mood for Love or Lost In Translation, that fade in a whisper unheard by the audience. These two are coy films, ending with a lover’s wink, alternately seducing us and holding us at arm’s length. The percussion at the end of Nazarín, on the other hand, is like an ellipsis. It undoes itself. Angrily refusing to yield to closure, it points us onward to the range of possibilities posed by its storyline. Like a sentence that can’t even conceive of being fully comprehended by something as pat as a period…
The official guarding Nazario stops at a roadside stand for some refreshment and continues on his way. The lady at the stand turns to Nazario and places a melon in his hands. The broken priest turns back to the dusty road with his melon, and a blast of percussion tracks the movement of his face towards a realization of where he is actually headed. Some see the change in his expression as a realization that this charitable melon has validated his cruciform largesse. Not only can he give charity, he can also receive it. But I think the opposite is the case. His resigned expression enables us to feel the weight of this melon like a biblical millstone. It is emblematic of his career, which Buñuel poses as an absurd failure. His pastoral vision has been misapplied, misconstrued, and ineffective. This melon, as an odd token of charity, is a metaphor for what Buñuel thinks is so ridiculous about pastoral sacrifice. How will he, bound and stumbling to prison, even enjoy the melon? How will it help him? And now he is stuck with it, an extra burden on a long journey towards death – a constant reminder of a fraudulent promise.
This is the same conundrum that has been engaged comprehensively by contemporary theological musing on ethics and justice. It is the one nibbled at by Neihbur in his exposition of the ways the church addresses Christ and Culture. It is a thread of the Gordian knot Tillich tried to unravel. These days theologians and ethicists like Hauerwas have helmed a reconfiguration of Christian thinking on social justice and the Church. Ultimately, Buñuel’s symbolic world is Catholic, but this does not limit the more broadly theological implications of his (non)conclusion.
The question facing the contemporary Church is the very one Nazario tried to answer in his odd parish. Namely, how does the Church deal with the injustices of poverty and social marginalization? Nazario’s answer is total immersion, participation, nullifying suffering by grace on a case by case basis. Buñuel’s critique of the Church in Nazarín, occurs at this level, and his answer to the same question is: It can’t. To share in the suffering of those affected by injustice as the pastoral presence of God is to become part of the injustice in the world. Nazario’s pastoral impulse left every situation worse than he found it.
For Buñuel, the absurdity of the world is only matched by those who attempt to redeem it by placing themselves in its context. This is a very contemporary concept. It is only in the last few decades that social justice has become a mainstream American Christian concept, culminating in the masses of “younger evangelicals” that opted for Obama’s moral vision over the insular excesses of Red statism. It is this movement of the Church that Buñuel attempts to expose as a Dadaist banality, an undoing of the very thing it seeks to do. Nazarín is the parable of a Church caught up in the very system it is seeking to subvert, only to discover that it has itself been subverted by Orwell’s bootheel, Hitchen’s Missionary Position, the faceless horror of Camus’ prison. The melon is the millstone that drags us all to hell. So says Buñuel. It is a baffling film in response to a baffling question that hadn’t ever been so eloquently asked.