The filmmaker Pere Portabella explains a masterful anecdote by Luis Buñuel in his memoir Impugn the norms, which demonstrates the importance of knowing how to make a virtue of necessity, following the filming of Viridiana, which would win the Palme d’Or in Cannes. The editorial in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano turned out to be a furious attack on the film. In fact, Franco’s censorship had forced its ending to be changed.
The general director of Cinema, José Muñoz Fontán, had told Buñuel that there was a problem in passing the censorship bar: “You will not deny that, when in the final scene of the film the young novice in a nightgown addresses her handsome cousin’s room and he invites her in and closes the door behind her while the word end comes out, anyone can think badly about what can happen behind the door. Buñuel was left speechless, until the general director offered a solution to unblock the situation: “Of course, if there was another person when the young novice entered the room, since there were three there would no longer be a problem.” The director applauded the suggestion of replacing the two-person scene with a ménage à trois, where the novice (Silvia Pinal), the cousin (Paco Rabal) and the maid (Margarita Lozano) appeared. Portabella assures that everyone understood that it was a much brighter ending.
This is a clear case of how necessity can be turned into a virtue, more or less what Pedro Sánchez is doing with the Sunday coven of the extreme right, with Javier Milei as the protagonist. The Spanish president believes that the clash with the ultras may prove to be the best stimulus for the next European elections. The speeches of its leaders in the bullring of Vista Alegre, with an unspeakable Santiago Abascal calling “to kick out and run with a hat to the coalition government,” have served not only to tighten the ranks of the left, but also to mobilize the moderates. Every cloud has a silver lining.
In any case, they must know how to find the tone of their responses and the story of the threats. Lest it happens to them like the witty José Muñoz Fontán, whose brilliant idea did not protect him from dismissal.
