That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

          The final film of revered Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and also one of his most accessible movies, That Obscure Object of Desire uses several playful storytelling devices while presenting the tale of an older man driven to distraction by his love for a mercurial young woman. Unlike the many May-December movies of the ’60s and ’70s that show middle-aged dudes sharing wisdom with nymphets who open their eyes to new ways of seeing, That Obscure Object of Desire gets after something more, well, obscure. Articulating some of Buñuel’s themes would require giving away the resolution of the story, but in general the picture conveys ideas about class, gender, propriety, and self-image, among many other things. Naturally, Buñuel includes two his favorite tropes, radical politics and surrealism, though they don't render the picture impenetrable, as happened with the director’s previous effort, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Instead, politics and surrealism function like grace notes, adding ambiguity, complexity, and relevance to a story that’s already rich.

          It should also be noted that Buñuel plays a tricky game by accentuating the breathtaking beauty of two starlets, both of whom play the same role (more on that later). It’s as Buñuel hoped to simultaneously satirize older men who court young ladies and beguile the audience with images of nubile flesh. One can only imagine what feminist critics have discovered while dissecting this picture, which somehow manages to celebrate and demonize women in equal measure.

          The picture begins with a droll vignette. After sophisticated gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) boards a train, comely young Conchita (Carole Bouquet) boards a separate car. Matheiu pays an attendant to kick her off, and then Mathieu dumps a bucket of water on her head. The other passengers in his first-class car express shock at his behavior, so he offers to explain why humiliating the woman was preferable to his first impulse of killing her. Buñuel illustrates Mathieu’s story with extended flashbacks. After encountering Conchita for the first time in his own home, where she served briefly as a maid, Mathieu became obsessed with her, chasing Conchita across Europe, offering money to her mother as a sort of dowry, and eventually persuading Conchita to cohabitate. She drove Mathieu mad by repeatedly offering sexual favors, only to refuse them at the last moment. A final round of indignities led to the episode at the train station.

          Among the many peculiar things about That Obscure Object of Desire is the casting of the Conchita role. For no obvious narrative reason, Bouquet shares the role with the equally alluring Angelina Molina. In any given scene, the audience can’t predict which actress will appear, and sometimes, one actress replaces the other in the same scene, thanks to a convenient exit/entrance maneuver. It’s a typically whimsical touch on Buñuel’s part, forcing the audience to ask questions about identity and perception without providing any fodder for answers. The actresses radiate different types of sexiness, Bouqet icy and Molina sensual, so their collective effect on Rey’s character is more than believable. Still, he’s a tougher nut to crack, part worldly aesthete and part love-addled buffoon. These contradictions make his characterization consistent with Buñuel’s longstanding attitude toward the moneyed class. As to the question of whether That Obscure Object of Desire works, the answer is mostly yes. The movie is mysterious and sly and unpredictable, and the final gotcha moment says something bitterly funny about the ephemeral nature of life—after all the fuss, that’s how it ends? It’s a fitting final statement for Buñuel, frustrating and ridiculous and true all at once.

That Obscure Object of Desire: GROOVY

The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

          There’s a bad tendency in critical circles of attributing greatness to art simply because it’s made by great artists, which is to say that anything rendered by someone with a record of significant accomplishments is therefore, by definition, significant. I’ve certainly been guilty of this infraction, heaping undeserved praise on work that I wanted to be good simply because of my loyalty to the creator of that work. And, it should be said, important artists in any field deserve the benefit of the doubt, at least to a certain degree; sometimes it’s helpful for an artist to expand his or her body of work without necessarily bettering past accomplishments. The goal of this preamble is to contextualize my declaration that I don’t know what the hell to make of Luis Buñuel’s penultimate feature, The Phantom of Liberty.

          Conventional in its technical execution but abstract in most other regards, the movie comprises a series of loosely connected episodes, all of which seem to satirize the upper class, a lifelong target of Buñuel’s comedic invective. Some stand-alone vignettes are amusing, and others are pleasantly weird, but I didn’t lock into the film’s frequency at all, finding The Phantom of Liberty flat and pointless more often that not. However, many intelligent people swear the film is brilliant, and Buñuel said it was among his favorite creations. So who am I to say if it’s “bad” or “good”? After all, if I’ve gone too far in the other direction, lauding work that didn’t deserve accolades, it logically follows that I’ll periodically err in the other direction, missing the virtues of something wonderful. Accordingly, before I offer a bit of description, I’ll leave it at this—The Phantom of Liberty did nothing for me, but Buñuel was such a skilled filmmaker, even at this late stage of his life, that I’m confident something of value imbues the picture.

          The Phantom of Liberty opens in Spain during the time of Napoleon. Crude French soldiers invade a crypt, and a male statue swats one of the soldiers after the soldier kisses a female statue. On the surface, it’s a dumb sight gag right out of an Abbott and Costello flick, but underneath, it’s laden with all sorts of weighty political stuff about class and culture. And so it goes from there—every so often, The Phantom of Liberty provides something accessible and silly, like the image of monks drinking and smoking while they play poker with a woman, but more frequently, the film presents things that would require either a political-science degree or superhuman insight into Buñuel’s mind to correctly interpret. The movie’s code isn’t fully secret, which is to say that mindful viewers can arrive at valid interpretations, but, plainly, only the filmmaker truly knew what the sum effect of the movie was meant to be.

          As to the question of whether the picture genuinely has a grand design, it’s interesting to consider the most successful comedy scene, which is obvious and self-contained. In the scene, several well-to-do people gather for a dinner party, then sit on commodes that surround a table and perform excretory functions while chatting. Upon achieving relief, a guest discreetly asks the maid, “Excuse me, where is the dining room?” Also during the scene, a mother admonishes her child for being so rude as to mention food at the table. It’s a simple flip of social conventions, and the absurdity of the scene is entertaining, but what’s the point? To imply that everything normal and polite is inherently ridiculous, or simply to make viewers engage reality on a deeper level by presenting an upside-down version of reality? Like I said before, I recognize there’s something resonant here, but damned if I can figure out what that is.

The Phantom of Liberty: FUNKY

Tristana (1970)

          An offbeat character study with elements of radical politics and romantic tragedy, the Spanish film Tristana was adapted from a novel by Bentio Péres Galdós’ novel by the acclaimed avant-garde director Luis Buñuel. French actress Catherine Deneuve, whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, stars as Tristana, a beautiful young woman with limited life experience who finds herself thrust into a new world after becoming an orphan. Taken in as a ward by much-older aristocrat Don Lope Garrido—who rebels against society by refusing to work, instead living off old money and the sale of heirlooms—Tristana is confused when Don Lope begins expressing romantic interest, but she accepts his advances out of a sense of obligation.
           Don Lope (played by Fernando Rey) does not insist on marriage because of his nonconformist ways, so when Tristana meets handsome artist Horacio (Franco Nero), a bizarre triangle emerges. Despite all his bold talk about personal freedom, Don Lope tries to enforce his economic, psychological, and sociopolitical claims on Tristana, which has the effect of pushing her further away. Then fate intervenes in cruel ways, creating unexpected complications that take the story from the pedestrian realm of domestic melodrama into the rarified terrain of literary irony.

          While Tristana forefronts issues of class, idealism, and political theory just as strongly as Buñuel’s other films, the movie can be consumed either as a sharp parable or as a simple human narrative. For example, Don Lope’s myriad proclamations about the role of the individual in society (e.g., “We’re happy because neither you nor I have lost our sense of freedom”) speak to Buñuel’s pet theme of preserving identity amid totalitarianism. Yet the proclamations also illustrate the self-serving worldview of a cad who wishes to justify his lascivious behavior. As a case in point, consider Don Lope’s perspective on work: “Down with work that you have to do to survive! That work isn’t honorable. All it does is fatten the exploiting swine. However, what you do for pleasure ennobles man. If only we could all work like that.”

          The catch, of course, is that Don Lope embraces his anarchistic principles when they help coax beautiful young Tristana into bed, and then sings a different tune when she meets an age-appropriate suitor. The X factor in the storyline is Tristana herself, whom Buñuel depicts as an innocent turned cynical and opportunistic by extended exposure to the avarice of man. (One can’t blame her for changing after hearing Don Lope spend years saying things like, “I’m your father and your husband—one or the other, as it suits me.”)

          Although Deneuve captivates with her magnetic screen presence and overwhelming beauty, it’s actually frequent Buñuel collaborator Rey who carries Tristana. He portrays Don Lope as a pathetic failure who hides behind a meticulous appearance and thunderous oratory. Once age and loneliness remove Don Lope’s armor, Rey shows the character’s sad vulnerability without mitigating Don Lope’s insidious qualities. (Costar Franco, an Italian whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, mostly gets lost in the shuffle.) Tristana moves along briskly and features several compellingly strange motifs, so while it lacks the edgy wit of, say, Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), it’s very much of a piece with the director’s myriad condemnations of the ruling class. Plus, on some levels, the movie is a good old-fashioned yarn about a woman trying to seize limited opportunities during an oppressive time—while appropriate for the feminism era, it’s also the type of story in which someone like Joan Fontaine might have appeared during the ’40s heyday of Hollywood “women’s films.”

Tristana: GROOVY

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

          One of Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s most acclaimed works and an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is not the easiest movie to penetrate—the story’s satire operates at such a sophisticated level that it’s easy to mistake some stretches of the narrative for straightforward psychodrama. Plus, as was Buñuel’s wont, the story loops around itself several times via tricky dream sequences and fake-outs that obscure what’s “really” happening. Yet for patient viewers willing to participate in Buñuel’s postmodern games, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie delivers a droll appraisal of the way feelings of entitlement blind the semi-rich to the absurdity of their own circumstances.

          The principal running gag of the movie involves a group of upper-middle-class friends attempting to get together for a dinner date. Throughout the story, outrageous events scuttle the plans—a restaurant holds a wake, complete with a corpse, during the dinner hour; a group of soldiers appears at a country house expecting entertainment and food; gun-toting gangsters invade a dinner party; and so on. The joke, of course, is that the protagonists are so preoccupied with creature comforts that they never lose their appetites—it’s as if the working-class people who interrupt the protagonists simply don’t exist. Meanwhile, Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière reveal the sordid activities of the main characters. A foreign ambassador (Fernando Rey) moonlights as a cocaine smuggler; a horny couple (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran) sneaks away from guests to screw in the woods; an underserviced housewife (Delphine Seyrig) has an affair with a family friend; et cetera.

          Even though The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie runs a brisk 102 minutes, Buñuel and Carrière cram a lot of narrative content into the movie—beyond the items already mentioned, there’s also a subplot about a sexy would-be terrorist and two strange sequences of people describing their dreams, which are depicted via surrealistic vignettes.

          Whether all of this material coalesces into a unified statement is a subjective matter, because the ambiguous final images could imply a heavy-handed theme of awful people stuck on a road to nowhere—or the images could imply something else. (Providing concrete answers was never Buñuel’s thing.) Appraising The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by standard criteria is pointless, seeing as how the film does not aspire to realism, but it’s sufficient to say that Buñuel stocks the film with attractive women, debonair men, and elegant locations—these slick surfaces amplify the director’s ideas about a class preoccupied with materialism. One more thing: Because other viewers may have the same experience, I should add that that the discreet charm of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie escaped me on first viewing, but the more I thought about the movie, the more its aesthetic scheme—and its virtues—came into focus.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: GROOVY