Buñuel and Blasphemy: Viridiana’s Last Supper

In what is perhaps the most famous scene of Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), Handel's Messiah gives rhythm to a bestial orgy: a burglary turned bourgeois banquet held by a motley group of beggars. Though the village paupers broke in and commandeered the estate of their benefactor ex-novitiate Viridiana with the intention of just "looking around," what was supposed to be a short vacation out of the proletarian realm quickly turns out to be a hedonistic feast. Buñuel takes advantage of the moment and delivers the following coup de grâce sacrilegious play on Da Vinci's Last Supper, a ploy Pope John XXIII himself would later deem blasphemous:

The party of pauper prophets is awkwardly reminiscent of the freaks of Browning's Freaks (1932). Among the horde is an outcast leper, a pregnant woman, a forceful blind fellow, a dwarf, a rheumatic, toothless tramp, a cripple, a woman with two small children, and a gnomish man, almost too distingué for the company he keeps.

With his strange role reversal, Buñuel, as he does in other films, turns paupers into ironic prophets, augurs of the human condition, messengers of the bad news that piety and faith are fruitless virtues in a world of avarice. Through their inebriated exploits, treachery and forceful sexual advances, the paupers further test and eventually break Viridiana, whose patience and faith had long been challenged in the first act by her uncle's domineering incestual advances and suicide. But it is only once normalcy returns to lives of the broken Viridiana, her cousin Jorge, and his chambermaid mistress, that Buñuel delivers his most blasphemous cinematic subtlety. Viridiana, perhaps now an anti-believer, a believer in the pauper's anti-gospel, lets her once conservatively-kept hair down, and knocks on Jorge's door as if in a trance. Despite being with his mistress, Jorge coolly invites Viridiana in "for a game of cards."— clearly a double entendre. "But I don't know how to play," the innocent ex-novitiate replies softly, playing along. "I'll teach you." ... And with that the house of three becomes the stage of a suggested ménage à trois — the stage of yet another sin, yet another blasphemy.