Buñuel returned to Spain after 23 years' exile to make Viridiana, the film that won him the Vatican's condemnation, the Cannes Palme D'Or, and widespread box-office success. Viridiana longs to become a nun, but on the eve of taking her vows, she makes a last visit to the home of her uncle, who sees in her the reincarnation of his dead wife. She never returns to the convent, but turns the estate into a haven for society's outcasts. People, the film asserts, must become completely human before they can become saints. But the complete surrender of the spiritual world to materialism is nowhere better evoked than in the famous orgy scene, set to Handel's Messiah. The chic scandal that the film touched off, and the director's own quips (“It was chance that led me to project the impious; if I had any pious ideas, perhaps I would express them too....”) tend to obscure the film's complexities, and its consistently disturbing atmosphere, into which Buñuel inserts some of his most erotic and religious imagery.