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Pained Penguin. But Spain, Franco and Buñuel now seem equally aged, if not exactly mellowed. The director and his French wife maintain homes in Mexico and Madrid. Both of his sons dabble in the arts, Raphael as a sculptor, Juan Luis as an experimental-film maker. This fall, the old man returned to his motherland once more, where, again, he is working on his "last" film. Under the sullen skies of Toledo, he directs scenes from Tristana, a dissection of Spanish middle-class society. One scene is purest Buñueliana: a crumpled, baggy-eyed Catherine Deneuve sits in a wheelchair, munching empty ice cream cones. Pushing the wheelchair is a deaf-mute with a demented stare, while from a park bench a large woman breast-feeding her child stares vacantly at the tragic caravan.
Grunting in a heavy Aragonese accent, Director Buñuel articulates his mouth little and his bones even less. As a result, actors and production staff are often forced to sift for themselves every mysterious movement. "He's old; he has his own way of working and his own discipline, and you have to fit into that discipline," says Deneuve. "You wake up in the morning knowing you're going to have to accept what he tells you to do without question; not with resignation but with confidence." Her confidence may have been bolstered by another of Buñuel's symbolic acts; early this month, for the first time in 20 years, he departed from his custom of dining alone while a film is being shot. He had dinner with her.
On set and off, weary and almost completely deaf, Buñuel moves like a pained penguin, as if he feels every second of his 69 years. Yet like his countryman Picasso, his large, intense eyes seem illuminated from inside by some unquenchable zeal. No one knows whether Tristana will indeed be his finale or whether Luis Buñuel is trying to propitiate fate by loudly leaving art before reality quietly leaves him. If there is any certainty about the enigmatic old film maker, it was recently voiced by New Wave Director Louis Malle: "Buñuel will die with the director's light meter dangling round his neck."