Word: lopes
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Tristana is the ward of a graying voluptuary, Don Lope (Fernando Key). Lope is an aristocrat, an atheist and a hypocrite-three distinct personalities that Rey manages to portray simultaneously. As his money and his vigor recede, Don Lope pursues the bewildered girl and overtakes her. Once seduced, Tristana is a figure of metastasizing vengeance. When she becomes the mistress of a young artist (Franco Nero), Don Lope shouts in misery, "I prefer tragedy to ridicule . . ." The girl awards him both. Her flight with the artist is ended by a disease that costs her a leg. Convalescing in the house...
Much of Tristana's success lies in the director's scrupulous ambition. Once he was satisfied with the village atheism of Nazarin or the facile eroticism of Belle de Jour. In his 29th film, he is content with nothing less than the face of Spain. Don Lope's backchat with his comrades is an indelible vignette of the inhuman condition, where the aging pick the reputations of their fallen comrades, like buzzards wheeling over cadavers. In the background hover the symbolic figures of deaf-mutes, youths whose voices, like many Spaniards', cannot be heard. Yet Tristana...
...through. In Rats, the evening's opener, two rats discuss their backgrounds and childhoods in an oversized nursery. In The Indian, (Eastern, not American) Wants the Bronx, two 1950-vintage JD's decide to beat up on an Indian. The endings invariably contain a startling twist, but those middles lope from one half-achieved punchline to the next in an attempt to give substance to what is basically situation comedy or tragedy. In a sense Horovitz may be writing plays backwards. Instead of prefabricating beginning, middle, and end for the actors, he ought to let them improvise on his situations...