Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is a virginal young girl who goes to live with her guardian (Fernando Rey), an older man who eventually breaks through his facade of respectability and seduces her. She repays him a hundred fold, preying on his jealousy and taunting him with her perverse whimsies. Critic Tom Milne writes: "Cripples, church bells, a crucifix, fetishistic feet, all bearing discreet witness to the torments of a tale of amour fou: Tristana is so absolutely inexorably a Buñuel film, telling everything but explaining nothing as it marshals wild cohorts of obsessions into a delicate filigree of pain, that it takes really Buñuelian language to describe it. Tristana as the exterminating angel, perhaps, taking her mocking revenge on all those heroes from Crusoe, El and Archibaldo onwards who fought so desperately for release from their solitude...and who have now grown old, weak and defenseless..."