Luis Buñuel often dealt with the hypocrisy of society — especially the Catholic Church — in his films. This 45-minute film is an extremely subtle and surreal satire of religious piety.
St. Simon (Claudio Brook, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL) lives in the 4th Century atop a pillar where he preaches to passers-by for six years, six months and six days. The story begins with a rich man giving Simon an even taller pillar to stand on. The townsfolk literally put him on a pedestal. Simon shames the priests’ piety with his devotion. From time to time, he has visions of the devil (Silvia Pinal, VIRIDIANA) as woman with a water jug, a tempting schoolgirl and an androgynous Greek with one breast bare and wearing a beard.
Buñuel skewers extreme ritual with Simon fasting to an arbitrary time then eating food hoisted to him from the ground. He wants to cut connection with the human world so he can be completely devoted to God, however he still preaches to the people, even performing miracles that the people take for granted. A little person farmer (Jesus Fernandez, NAZARÍN) asks for blessings for him and his goat, but wants blessings for himself that are different than the ones for the animal.
Simon’s mother (Hortensia Santoveña) wants to care for her son, but he has no time for her. So she camps near the pillar in a kind of perpetual mourning. Here, Buñuel attacks the common imagery of a crying Mother Mary and her torture son, Jesus, denying the teachings of love and service that Christ was more concerned with. After one of the devil’s temptations, Simon decides he must make his sacrifice even greater to cleanse his soul, but what he chooses to do is actually quite silly and pointless.
Buñuel is never afraid to bring the surreal into his films to create powerful metaphors. You know you’re really in a strange world when a coffin comes sliding across the desert by itself. However, the ending is completely unexpected, taking the story in a bizarre direction. Buñuel is truly a filmmaker who was not bound by convention. His films are always thought-provoking and never shy away from making unpopular observations. This mini-feature tackles issues that are common in Buñuel’s work with sly wit and biting satire. He is one of the best that ever was or will be.