by Ed Howard
Luis Buñuel’s final film of his Mexican period is the short, punchy Simon of the Desert, possibly the great surrealist’s wittiest and funniest film, and certainly his most focused meditation on a subject that interested him throughout his career: the combined folly and nobility of profound religious faith. Certainly, there is no protagonist in Buñuel’s oeuvre who better represents this dialectical representation of religion than the holy fool Simon (Claudio Brook), an ascetic who lives alone in the desert on the top of a pillar, fasting, praying, willfully turning his back on the entirety of the world. When the film opens, he has in essence been rewarded for his solitary suffering: the local priests come to offer Simon a better, taller pillar, donated by a rich man, and Simon accepts. The man who professes to want no worldly things, to have no need for his fellow beings, thinks nothing of taking this gift, a worldly and ornate pillar on which he can make his ascetic offerings to God. Buñuel makes even more of a sly joke of it by having the priests tell him that he’s been standing on this pillar for six years, six months and six days: the Biblical number of the Beast from the Book of Revelations, a sign of the Apocalypse.
For Simon, this apocalypse of course comes in a very worldly form, specifically in the form of the luscious, womanly Silvia Pinal, a recurring Buñuel player most famous for her lead role in Viridiana. She is a seductive, strangely appealing Devil, appearing beneath Simon’s pillar or even on it with him to offer him various temptations — not least of which is her own disrobed body. She appears first as a hip-swaying local woman who catches the eye of one of the priests but not of Simon, who uses her only as an example of the evil lure of women. She appears next as a faux-schoolgirl with sexy garters and stockings beneath her innocent uniform, singing a shrill and sing-songy mockery of Simon’s religious devotion while trying to seduce him with her long, serpentine tongue or bare breasts. Most cleverly (and hilariously), she briefly tricks Simon by appearing to him as an embodiment of God himself, a young shepherd in a tunic with an unconvincing blonde beard and curls obscuring her femininity. Pinal is, in fact, not Buñuel’s vision of the Devil but the vision of the Devil that Simon himself might concoct: the man who turns his back on the world is of course tempted by a Devil who offers nothing but worldly, fleshy pleasures. Simon, though, is stoic, and Pinal’s Satan seduces the audience long before she is able to hold any sway over her faithful target.
Despite the obvious twinkling-eyed glee that Buñuel takes in his incarnation of Satan, the film’s sympathy is more closely aligned with Simon despite his religious asceticism and ridiculousness. Buñuel seems to have a grudging respect for the extent of Simon’s devotion, even as he mocks and satirizes the pointless disconnection from the world that it entails. Simon is a kind, generous, noble man, a true gentle spirit who seems unable even to comprehend the petty nastiness and jealousies of other men. He has real problems communicating with his fellow men, not understanding concepts like conflicts over property or the desire for food that provides more than basic sustenance. His separation from the world is extreme, but there’s something pure and sweet about Simon, especially in comparison to the crassness of the people around him. In one early scene, Simon performs a miracle by restoring the amputated hands of a man in the crowd. The miracle is accompanied by typically sweeping, ecstatic religious music, culminating in a wondrous moment when the man looks at his former stumps and finds his hands, suddenly, returned. The religious ecstasy is short-lived, however. The man abruptly, without giving thanks or showing any further sign of wonder or happiness, gathers his wife and children and heads back home to hoe his garden; his first action with his new hands is to slap one of his daughters for pestering him with questions. In the crowd, as two men walk away, one asks if the other saw that. “What?” “That thing with the hands.” The answer is an indifferent grunt and a shrug.
Clearly, Buñuel is to some extent satirizing the self-centered, disinterested outlook of these people, who have little wonder or gratitude for Simon’s miracles; their selfishness and bitterness seems like a dark contrast to Simon’s gentle nature and devotion. But this scene is not as simple as it seems on its surface. In fact, what Buñuel is pointing out here is that these people literally can’t afford to live in the same way as Simon does. When the man gets his hands back, his first thought is not to give thanks or offer prayer, but to get back home as soon as possible so he can start doing what he could not do before: hoe his garden, growing crops to make money and feed his family. Even the two men in the crowd who react so stoically to this miracle turn to talking about food instead, inquiring if there is any bread left. For these people, Simon’s life of religious devotion is a kind of luxury, a freedom from practicality and everyday concerns like caring for one’s family and having enough to live and eat. Simon’s diet might be meager, but his food and water are brought to him every week by the priests. He does not provide for himself, and so can afford to give himself up utterly to God, to place himself on a literal pedestal above his fellow man: a gesture of pride at his ability to avoid the petty struggles for survival that occupy the poor beings scurrying around below him.
In this way, Buñuel makes Simon a curiously ambivalent figure, a man genuinely striving for spiritual purity and communion with God who, in doing so, alienates himself from both the pleasures and the responsibilities of humanity. Simon is certainly not immune to the sharp crack of Buñuel’s satirical whip. With his bizarre forked beard and oblivious manner, Simon is an obvious target for mockery, like the scene where he stumbles in the middle of a prayer and forgets what to say next. He’s so disconnected from the world that he constantly threatens to lose track even of his own actions. At one point, he acquires a passing mania for blessings, blessing the poor and their soil, a goat and its profane midget owner and a cricket before looking around for more things to bless, rambling and mumbling to himself. He even reaches into his mouth, pulls out a tooth and begins gesturing as though about to bless it, stopping short when he realizes what he’s doing and tosses the tooth aside. Brook plays Simon as a combination saintly holy man, delirious lunatic and senile old fogey, and his distracted behavior is both endearing and silly.
Nowhere is Buñuel’s ambivalence towards this religious icon more apparent than in the film’s brilliant final sequence, in which Pinal’s Satan devises her final temptation for Simon: she whisks him, via passing jumbo jet, into a modern-day city. Here, Simon and Satan attend a dance club together, watching the teenagers do a new dance; Pinal says it’s called “radioactive flesh,” the “latest dance and the last dance,” and the teens’ spastic, frenetic movements indeed suggest the contortions of flesh on fire. But this is a seduction that Simon doesn’t resist too fiercely. He simply sits off to the side, not participating in the dance but not running away either, calmly smoking a pipe, his beard groomed and his rags exchanged for a smart college professor sweater. He doesn’t quite give in, it’s more like a compromise with Satan. Perhaps, ultimately, the world just proves too much fun, too energetic, too wild and free to sit entirely apart from it. As the bodies whirl across the screen and Pinal’s smirking Satan joins the party, the film simply ends, with Simon trapped, not altogether unwillingly, in the midst of the chaotic frenzy of the dance, a worldly, sexualized dance he’d spent his whole live until then scrupulously avoiding. Buñuel neither celebrates nor mourns Simon’s “fall,” but views it as necessary, a condition of existence: we must all make peace with the dance.
How Simon of the Desert made the Top 100:
Bill Riley No. 7
Mark Smith No. 10
Ed Howard No. 24
Roderick Heath No. 26
Sam Juliano No. 53
Pedro Silva No. 57
Fantastic. Love this film. Ed, another superb piece. Richly enjoyable.
Ed you certainly write a great piece here on a fine film by Bunuel, if not in his top-tier. This overall is a rather short and not fully developed work. I think the ending is muddled and unsatisfactory IMO. The fact that he’s whisked to a modern dance club somewhat takes the film from a direct attack on Simon’s ideals to a more distanced regard for the man. I mean yes he does stay in the nightclub, but where is he supposed to go? He’s been whisked 2000 years into the future and knows nothing of this. A more biting critique would have been to whisk him to some equivalent in his own time….and determine his motives under that consideration. I find the ending to drag the film to a screeching halt to the point where it’s anticlimactic. Bunuel has already made his point.
Thanks, guys. Sorry if I’ve been a little absent of late – a three-month-old tends to eat up one’s time. As a result my blogging has been running on autopilot, with all my posts scheduled long ago as well as the old pieces being reprinted as part of this countdown. I do hope to get more active again eventually.
Anyway, I obviously disagree, Jon, about the ending, which if I remember correctly was a hastily assembled conclusion to what was originally supposed to be a longer film, until Bunuel ran out of money. It’s definitely a bit of a non-sequitur, but for me it works, not least because it continues the ambivalent tone of the film as a whole. It’s not at all apparent how we’re meant to feel about that ending, or if it’s really meant to be a true test of Simon’s religious conviction. It’s just an absurd disjunction, abruptly placing this holy man into a context where his religion and his ideals make even less sense than they did in his own time.
Yeah but I don’t get the sense that the film is actually that ambivalent about him in the first place. Bunuel clearly throughout his career mocked Catholicism. One of the reasons he was banned in his early career. I think his back history here should provide far more insight into his direct and pointed attack. I don’t see ambivalence. Therefore to have the film simply take the foot off the gas at the end and leave us hanging really adds nothing to the film….where earlier in the film his attacks were mounted far more effectively. Not to mention as for pacing it just feels off.
Congrats on the new baby by the way!
Let’s also not forget that during this portion of his career, Bunuel was known as an atheist and said so in his own words. Later on recanting some of that does not put a dispute in where Bunuel would stand regarding religion and religious zealots as far as this film goes.
Didn’t Bunuel say that he was never an atheist and that the famous quote was more of a joke than an actual belief. Obviously organized religion (and human gullibility) was his main focus of attack in this area… not the belief in some higher power.
Yes that was much later that he recanted that. It is clear Bunuel has a history of attacking organized religion…..that can’t be separated from the point of view of this film and whether the film is truly ambivalent about the subject matter. I’m just saying it’s not an ambivalent film.
Lovely highlighting of that rich vein of comedy in aspiring for the sublime. It’s also at the heart of a comedy with very different specifics, Lubitsch’s The Shop around the Corner.
The ending makes the film, but makes it more than what it seemed to be. Bunuel seems to be saying something about the Sixties as well as something about Simon, perhaps something about alienation as opposed to engagement, or an asceticism that’s indifferent rather than antagonistic and therefore not constructive either. Also, Simon’s asceticism was the spectacle of his time and place, but where everyone takes part in the spectacle of the dance club, Simon becomes a mere spectator. Make of that what you will. I didn’t vote for Simon, but I’m kind of glad he made the list.
Ed, you did a fine job explaining why you like this film so much to place it as high as you did on your ballot. Bunuel was a great filmmaker, but this strikes me as minor Bunuel even though it is a lot of fun. It feels too improvised, fragmentary, and casually constructed to be completely effective. A film like “The Milky Way” is similarly structured as a series of anticlerical anecdotes, but it feels much more focused, and its narrative structure more controlled. I know that Bunuel envisioned a longer film but ran out of money. Still, he almost seems to be making up the film as he goes along, and maybe that’s why for me it seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. I don’t get that feeling from his best films, where even if they often give an impression of spontaneity, he seems to know exactly where he wants to go and how he plans to get there.
I like your thoughts on the character of Simon, especially when you wrote that “Simon is a kind, generous, noble man, a true gentle spirit who seems unable even to comprehend the petty nastiness and jealousies of other men…. His separation from the world is extreme, but there’s something pure and sweet about Simon.” That was nicely stated and pinpointed the film’s main appeal for me–watching the naive Simon trying to live a life of probity in a corrupt world, guided only be his own inner goodness and his stubbornness.
R.D.—-
While your observations are as always exceedingly exceptional, I am not in agreement that the film’s improvisational and fragmented structure is necessarily a debit. I found SIMON a splendidly concise, wickedly funny, and exceedingly blasphemous satire that as Ed so marvelously frames above is a no-holds-barred attack on organized religion and those who perpetrate it and maintain it through bizare rituals. SIMON is indeed an object of mockery and scorn, but little goes unscathed. Bunuel has a dim view of the human condition that bares some striking similarities with his Mexican film EL, and his vision is economical, thematically focused, and driven by it’s compelling sairical underpinnings. I like the way the film allows fo noreal structural cohesion, as that in and of itself supports the outrageous non-conformity of the film. Another Ed Howard writing masterpiece, of what may well be Bunuel’s flat out funniest film.
Sam I too feel that for the most part Simon himself is indeed mocked and rather scorned and even though there are stretches where it might appear that Bunuel is attempting to give him some sort of dignity, it is always undermined by the next thing coming….hence the comedy. Bunuel is continually pulling out the rug from underneath Simon. To me Bunuel is very clear here.
R.D. I too find this to be somewhat minor Bunuel, if the case can be made at all. I still think the ending is probably it’s most distracting and ineffective setpiece. Several other sections are pure brilliance but as a complete work it does not connect in totality.
Jon, this was the very first Bunuel film I saw in a college class back in 1973, and even with theatrical viewings in the next few years of DISCREET CHARM, VIRIDIANA and NAZARIN among others, I valued it on top tier, and compared any lowering of it as similar to those saying Resnais’ short NIGHT AND FOG was not among his best work. But I respect your position of course as I do R.D.’s and know that the verdict on SIMON is generally divided as to that sentiment.
Sam…I hear ya. Actually Night and Fog may be one of the most effective and penetrating works ever made. I would have to watch Simon again to confirm my feelings. I just am really disappointed by the ending….I think that’s my main complaint. The rest of it I love.
Jon, although Ed offers some strong words for the viaility of the ending, and I feel it’s consistent, you are definately with the majority. The ending has always been a disclaimer, even with some who love the film. My cinema professor at Jersey City State College did not like the ending.
The story I read about Simon’s length was that it was originally meant to be part of one of the portmanteau pictures that were popular at the time.The producer, Silvia Pinal’s husband, reportedly approached Fellini and Jules Dassin about filming episodes but negotiations supposedly fell through because each director wanted his own wife, rather than Pinal, to star in his segment. Whether budget issues thwarted an attempt to expand Bunuel’s section to proper feature length is another story.
Like Ed, I love the ad hoc ending of ‘Simon’. A jetliner in the 5th century fits right in with the rest of the film’s surrealism, like the coffin gliding across the desert floor. One of Bunuel’s best, the beginning of his late career blossoming, and a fine appreciation by Ed.
wow this is some kind of writing by Ed Howard. I’m inclined to include this among Bunuel’s finest films. Surely as scandalous as any piece on religion, but that’s the point.