This is late Buñuel, mockingly sensible black comedy, set in Toledo in the early 1930s, in which an old guardian (Rey) seduces his young ward Tristana (Deneuve), but is unable to possess her, betrayed by surrealist lurches in time and reality and by Tristana's changing 'nature'. Rey is brilliant as the Mephistophelean, anti-clerical Socialist, dandy and outmoded master of social graces: father, lover and husband all in one. His passion ruins and softens him, but (caught as she is in the chauvinist paradox of woman as cause and eternal object of male aggression) it hardens Tristana from innocent virginity to icy revenge.