General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Tristana

Tristana is a 1970 drama film directed by Luis Buñuel, adapted from the 1892 novel of the same name by Benito Pérez Galdós, with a screenplay by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro. It stars Catherine Deneuve as the orphaned Tristana, Fernando Rey as her guardian and seducer Don Lope, and Franco Nero as the painter Horacio. A co-production of Spain, Italy, and France, it was filmed in Toledo and released in 1970 after a long struggle with the censors of Franco's Spain.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Luis Buñuel; screenplay by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, from the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós¹
Cast	Catherine Deneuve (Tristana), Fernando Rey (Don Lope), Franco Nero (Horacio), Lola Gaos, Antonio Casas¹^•³
Production and release	Produced 1969; Spanish release 29 March 1970; Spain, Italy, France co-production¹
Technical	35 mm, Eastmancolor, panoramic aspect ratio (1.66:1); running time reported as 105 minutes by the ICAA and 99 minutes by the Festival de Cannes⁴^•⁵
Spanish box office	410,061.44 € gross and 1,801,968 admissions⁶
Recognition	Shown out of competition at Cannes 1970; brought Buñuel his first Academy Award nomination, in the Best Foreign Language Film category⁵^•⁷
Restoration	Restored in its original European cut and re-released theatrically in 2012 by Cohen Media Group²^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

When Tristana's mother dies, the young woman is entrusted to the guardianship of Don Lope Garrido, an aging, well-respected nobleman in Toledo known for his honorable nature and his socialistic views on business and religion. Don Lope's weakness is women: he falls for the innocent girl in his charge, seduces her, and makes her his lover, all the while telling her that she is as free as he is.⁹ Living under the same roof, the two develop an unhealthy relationship that is at once father-daughter and that of lovers.¹⁰

Tristana begins to demand an education in music, art, and other subjects so that she can become independent, and she meets the young artist Horacio Díaz, with whom she falls in love and eventually leaves Toledo to live.⁵ When she falls ill, she returns to Don Lope; the illness results in the loss of a leg, which changes her prospects.⁵ The docile girl of the opening becomes a cold, bitter, and manipulative woman who returns to her aging benefactor and calculatingly hastens his demise.²^•¹¹ Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, described the film as a study of a relationship in which power changes hands, with the girl's repulsion at the old man's advances providing the key to her later character.¹²

From Galdós's novel to Buñuel's film

Buñuel had a long-standing passion for the work of his compatriot Benito Pérez Galdós, the nineteenth-century realist novelist, whom he had first adapted with Nazarín (1959) and then, very freely, in Viridiana (1961).¹³ According to the scholar Jo Labanyi, of the Spanish and Latin American studies tradition, Buñuel chose to film Galdós's 1892 novel Tristana because its heroine has her leg amputated; critics have largely read his insistence on Tristana's mutilated stump and artificial leg as a critique of a "castrating" traditional society.¹⁴ In Spanish film scholarship the amputated leg has been called the film's true protagonist, and the images of it have been analyzed as "images-pulsion" in the terminology of Gilles Deleuze.¹⁵

Buñuel himself considered the novel one of Galdós's worst, describing it as "of the 'I love you, my little pigeon' genre, very kitsch", yet he had wanted to film it since the 1950s, when he considered a Mexican version with Ernesto Alonso and Silvia Pinal.¹⁶ For the film he made two significant changes: he transposed the action from Madrid to Toledo, a city that had fascinated him in his youth, and he moved the period of the story from the late nineteenth century to the years from 1929 to 1935, when Buñuel himself had still been living in Spain.¹⁶ A later commentary in El País judged that in the film Buñuel left in second place the psychological dimension and the heroine's yearning for freedom that Galdós's book had explored.¹⁷

Production and censorship

The film took nearly two decades to reach the screen. Buñuel submitted the screenplay to the censors of Franco's Spain in 1963, and their response was unequivocal; the censors were wary of him after Viridiana, which the Franco government considered so subversive that it was banned despite winning the Palme d'Or as Spain's official entry at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival.¹⁶^•¹⁸^•¹⁴ In 1969, thanks to the persistence of the Spanish production company Epoca Films, the project was revived with co-production funding and two international stars, Catherine Deneuve and Franco Nero. The censors were again suspicious and threatened to block the film, but this time Buñuel managed to get around them; filming started in September.¹⁶ Kino Lorber's release notes describe the film as having been released in 1970 after protracted skirmishes with the censors of Generalissimo Franco's government.²

Casting and shoot. Deneuve, who had worked with Buñuel on Belle de Jour (1967), wrote to him as soon as she learned Tristana was going into production, asking to work with him again.¹³ Though the French star was imposed on Buñuel by the producers rather than being his own choice, he was happy with her.¹⁶ In the diary she kept during the shoot, Deneuve wrote that Buñuel had taken "total ownership of this film", and later told the critic Pascal Bonitzer that "Tristana is one of my favorite films. Personally, as an actress, I prefer Tristana to Belle de Jour."¹⁶ For Franco Nero, Tristana was the first film he shot with Buñuel and in Spain; he recalled that Buñuel never called him Franco, because of the dictator, but rather "¡Nero, Nero!"¹⁹

The production companies were Epoca Films and Talia Films in Spain, with Selenia Cinematografica in Italy and Les Films Corona in France; producers were Buñuel and Robert Dorfmann.⁴^•¹¹ The crew included the cinematographer José F. Aguayo, the editor Pedro del Rey, and the art director Enrique Alarcón.⁹ Tristana was only the third film Buñuel shot in Spain, after Las Hurdes (1932) and Viridiana (1961), and the last of the three.¹¹^•¹³

Release and reception

The Spanish film archive ICAA gives the Spanish release date as 29 March 1970, while Cineuropa lists it as 18 March 1970.¹^•⁹ It was shown out of competition at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and a restored print was presented in the Cannes Classics section in 2010.⁵ In Spain it was initially rated for audiences over eighteen (certified 4 March 1970), a restriction lowered to over sixteen in a 1978 re-certification.⁴ In Italy, the review commission granted a release visa in July 1970 with a ban on viewing for minors under fourteen, citing the "scabrousness" of the plot about a guardian's senile love for his young ward.²⁰

Critical standing. Vincent Canby championed the film in The New York Times, which has called it "the quintessential Buñuel film of all time", and The New Yorker praised it as "a brilliant film! The work of a master at the height of his powers."⁷^•² The film brought Buñuel his first Oscar nomination, in the Best Foreign Language Film category.⁷ The Spanish critic Carlos Losilla, writing in the Instituto Cervantes's history of Spanish cinema, placed it among Buñuel's best films and noted how its seemingly transparent, strict realism conceals darker waters: a dream in which Tristana sees Don Lope's head serving as the clapper of a cathedral bell, and the prosthetic leg filmed with a morbid erotic attraction that, Losilla notes, aroused the admiration of Alfred Hitchcock.²¹

The film's Spanish theatrical run drew 1,801,968 admissions and a gross of 410,061.44 €, figures recorded by the ICAA.⁶ A 2013 restoration from the Cohen Film Collection returned the film to theaters in its original European cut, and the film received a limited United States re-release from Cohen Media Group in November 2012.²^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1970s › Released 1970 to 1974

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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