Tristana is actually as controversial as Viridiana, but in a much more enigmatic way.
 Don Lope (Fernando Rey, who starred in many of Bu–uel's movies, including Viridiana), the old man who corrupts Tristana (Catherine Deneuve, who also starred in Bu–uel's Belle de Jour), eventually succumbs to her revenge as she is transformed over the years from a young ingenue to a femme fatale. Don Lope also changes from being anti-cleric to accepting priests in his house to play cards with him.

As the impoverished aristocrat, Don Lope mellows, when wealth arrives; Tristana on her side becomes cold and hard. There is amazing eroticism in her iciness, particularly in the scene where she gazes at the face of a reclining statue on top of a tomb.

The film begins and ends with Tristana walking along the city wall with Don Lope's servant, Saturna (played by Lola Gaos). They go to meet Saturno (acted by JesÏs Fern‡ndez), Saturna's son who is being trained in practical skills in a Catholic institution for the hearing disabled. Both Saturna and Saturno are essential foils to the unusual behaviour that is revealed, as they allow for the Bu–uelian abstractness to occur.
Tristana is possessed by a surrealistic nightmare (aren't they all?) that feeds her transformation.

It is with Saturno and another deaf student that she visits the bell tower of a church, and to Saturno that she reveals herself.  Though Tristana has been hailed as a feminist film, it is unlikely that Bu–uel intended it to be one. Instead he was exploring themes that repeat themselves in many of his film: the life and death of an older man, a dandy and freethinker; and how the younger woman copes with her seduction and confinement.
 In this case, even the grand old streets of Toledo become claustrophobic and laden with apprehension - as anything can happen in Bu–uel's films.

In Tristana we even have a priest giving the most unlikely advice to her.
Tristana is allowed out to take long walks with Saturna.

Even on these excursions she can exercise her game of choice: selecting one of two identical possibilities. On one she meets an artist, Horacio (Franco Nero), and they fall in love.

Here Tristana is able to make a choice, and no longer between two identical objects. After two years, though, fate intervenes in the strangest manner, and Tristana ends up back with Don Lope, who pronounces, "Now she can't escape me; if she enters my house she will never leave again".

Why she returns to this sadomasochistic relationship is clear on the surface, but murky underneath.

Tristana was to become Bu–uel's last film made in Spain. It grows on you after viewing it, and deserves to be seen more than once.
Tristana is one hour and 34 minutes long.
It is in Spanish with English subtitles. It is rated 15 plus. It is directed by Luis Bu–uel who also wrote the script with Julio Alejandro based on the novel by Benito PŽrez Gald˜s that was set in Toledo in 1892, not 1930.
The exquisite cinematographer is Jose F. Aguayo. The editor is Pedro del Rey.
Vincent Canby, writing in 1970, in The New York Times, has labeled Tristana "the quintessential Bu–uel film of all time". Now having seen both Viridiana and Tristana, you, like Tristana, should be able to chose between two snowflakes? Tristana was nominated for an Oscar as "Best Foreign-language Film".
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