The archetypal heroes of the comic, or serio-comic, films of Luis Buñuel such as El (1952), Nazarin (1958) and Simon of the Desert (1965) are pure, in either sense of the word: innocent, simple, homogeneous. They haven't a trace of deceit or hypocrisy and they aren't self-questioning or self-aware. Buñuel doesn't make Nazarin and Simon contradict their moral and religious principles. Instead, he makes them push these to their logical, absurd extreme. Yet the films reveal a dichotomy: the absoluteness of Nazarin, Simon and Francisco, which is their primary strength, is at the same time, in context, their primary weakness, their comic flaw. Buñuel puts his heroes in a multiple perspective which, in effect, defines character as primarily a matter of point of view…. The character Francisco [in El] is seen to be at once cruel, in his wife's eyes, godlike, in his own eyes, and pathetically comic...