Silvia and/as the Devil

A splendid little piece of life spent recently with Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert.  I’ve seen it several times. Each time I’ve seen it, one scene absorbs me, and I watch it over and over and over again. 

The Devil comes to tempt the Stylite who is out in the desert on his pillar, meditating and praying.  Satan takes the form of a sensual young woman, dressed as a schoolgirl, singing schoolyard songs with obscene lyrics.  She bears her shapely legs and breasts for Simon in a few shots that defy description. 

The actress is Silvia Pinal, a Mexican film icon and the mother of Alejandra Guzman, a charismatic, throaty-voiced Mexican rock singer whose music I came to know from spending time in Baja California long ago, while I was a grad student in San Diego. Same distinctively mesmerizing face as her mother.

And the images work in concert with the narrative to keep the entranced viewer at least potentially out of the grasp of lust for, however irresistible this prancing little demon might be, Simon gives us the moral lesson and resists her. He remains stoically on his pillar. Even at the film’s conclusion, when the sinfully gorgeous Pinal forcibly takes him away into a modern den of iniquity, that is, a smoke-filled dance hall, he sits quietly and does not fall under the spell. So the scene is both truthful to the power of the temptation of sin and adherent to the ascetic spirituality of the film’s namesake, and the viewer (this one, at least) oscillates in this moment between them.

Many of Buñuel’s works were explicitly critical of Christianity, but he was arguably always, in all of his cinematic creativity, precisely the kind of ex-Catholic who never manages to remove the spirit of the Church and its eternal concerns completely from his mind. I know a priest who talks about Catholicism as the “fun religion.” Fall away from the path, as is our destiny, but do not lose hope! The Church has infallible methods to bring you back into good standing so you can try again.

I was infinitely thankful for this doctrinal spiritual realism as I sat transfixed before the dazzling Silvia. I took still images of this startlingly powerful short scene in which she tempts both the Stylite and the viewer, not least because she was so breathtakingly beautiful in her youth, but also because of the peerless composition of the shots. 

In a better age, there were genius filmmakers like Buñuel, and I would prefer to see every one of his films thrice before I would waste my time watching anything made by anyone still alive. 

There is no doubt that Pinal was bedeviled by his genius. When he was asked to do a cinematic adaptation of Journal d'une femme de chambre shortly after this film, he agreed, with the intention to do it in Mexico with Pinal as the lead. The film’s producer however demanded it be shot in France. Though she did not speak French, Pinal was prepared to move there, learn the language, and do the film for free just to continue working with the great Spanish genius.

The stark black and white in the contrast of her outfit and her skin, her playful manner and posing, the miracle of this few seconds of motion and form and sound, captured on film, and now gone forevermore but for that technological miracle. 

Silvia Pinal is still with us, now 91 years old, God bless her soul. Her daughter Alejandra, who is approximately my age, was still three years unborn when her mother made this film. 

I hate the thought that a day will come when these miraculous images will no longer endure and no one will ever again be able to experience the total aesthetic joy and vigorous spiritual exercise they bring me every time they transmit themselves into my consciousness.