Simon of the desert = Simon del desierto

In the ancient Biblical lands, Saint Simon (Claudio Brook) has hoisted himself on an immense pillar and resolved to deny himself material pleasure in order to commute more faithfully with God. His zeal soon makes him famous throughout the desert lands, and priests and sinners arrive in the hope he will perform miracles for them. But all Simon wants is to be left alone. What’s worse, the vengeful and jealous Satan (Silvia Pinal) has no intention of letting Simon find a communication God denied her and she does everything in her power to tempt him away from Heaven. Luis Bunuel fled Franco’s Spain and went to Mexico where he continued to make gloriously subversive films that mocked the pieties of both the bourgeoisie and Catholicism. Bunuel’s Simon is a cruel ascetic miser who may love God but treats people, including his own mother, with harsh disdain. And it is Satan, mischievously played by the delightful Pinal, who is the real hero of this tale, her spiteful rage at God loving Jesus more than her making wickedly blasphemous sense. Satan gets her revenge when she transports Simon into the future and shows him a group of teenagers dancing to rock and roll: Christianity’s denial of the body does not conquer. Or does it? Bunuel’s surrealistic atheism is embedded in Catholicism’s rich source of imagery and ritual. “Simon of the Desert” is one of cinema’s supreme blasphemous jokes. In Spanish with English subtitles.