The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974)

Cast: Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi, Paul Frankeur, Michael Lonsdale, Pierre Maguelon, François Maistre, Hélène Perdrière, Michel Piccoli, Claude Piéplu, Jean Rochefort, Bernard Verley, Monica Vitti, Milena Vukotic. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The most famous, or notorious, scene in The Phantom of Liberty is the one above, in which a group of well-dressed people sit down at a table on flush toilets, and begin to discuss scatological matters. Eventually, one man excuses himself to go to the "dining room," a small private place where he can eat in privacy, an act that evidently would be disgusting if done in public. The film is a kind of tag-team of episodes, in which a secondary character in one scene becomes the central character of the next, all proceeding though dreamlike situations. In movies, dreams are typically not much like our real dreams; they're usually soft-focus and full of portentous events. But Luis Buñuel and his co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière know better: Real dreams seem to proceed with the kind of groundedness of daily life, but with logical inconsistencies that we don't question as we're dreaming them. For me, the most dreamlike sequence in The Phantom of Liberty is the one in which the Legendres (Jean Rochefort and Pascale Audret) rush to their daughter's school because she's been reported as having disappeared. When they get there, the little girl is present, but everyone behaves as if she has really disappeared. When they go to the police to report her disappearance, the girl accompanies them and even supplies information about her age, height, and weight to the police, who thank her and the parents and proceed to investigate the case. This is perhaps the most playful of Buñuel's films, though it contains his usual keen satire of bourgeois manners and mannerisms, and is chock-full of ideas about how we conform to conventions and rules that are at base arbitrary and irrational.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

Bulle Ogier, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Stéphane Audran,
and Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julien Bertheau, Milena Vukotic, Claude Piéplu. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The frustration of the bourgeoises in Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at having their various attempts to sit down at a table and have something like a meal never reaches the furious breaking point that it does for the characters who try to escape from a house party in his The Exterminating Angel (1962), but not because the director had mellowed in the decade between the two films. He had grown more sly and subtle, I think. The world of The Discreet Charm is liminal; the characters are trapped somewhere between dream and reality, between past and future, in a place they're determined to enjoy come what may. In the celebrated dream-within-a-dream, in which one character dreams what another character is dreaming, namely that they're on stage in a play without knowing what their lines are, even then they seem determined to make a go of it, just as the Sénéchals are determined to have sex even though they know their guests have just arrived for luncheon. There's a "keep calm and carry on" quality to these characters that's almost admirable, even when they're faced with the most absurd situations, like a corpse in the next room of the bistro, or a restaurant that has run out of tea and coffee. Not everything in the movie works, I think: The character of the priest/gardener who listens to an old man's confession that he murdered the priest's parents, gives him absolution, then blows him away with a shotgun, seems to me gratuitous -- Buñuel determined to exhibit his contempt for the clergy come what may. But on the other hand, it stayed with me even when I couldn't quite fit it into my overall experience of the film, which is a mad masterpiece.

At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018)

Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup. Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière, Julian Schnabel, Louise Kugelberg. Cineatography: Benoît Delhomme. Production design: Stéphane Cressend. Film editing: Louise Kugelberg, Julian Schnabel. Music: Tatiana Lisovskaya. 

Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate is less a dramatic biopic than a series of conversations about art and madness centered on the figure of Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe got yet another well-deserved Oscar nomination for playing van Gogh as a man who walks the line between genius and psychosis. Schnabel's contribution to this familiar story is to introduce a recent theory that van Gogh's death was not a suicide but instead a mishap, the result of a random gunshot when the artist was being harassed by a couple of young hoodlums. Van Gogh, in this theory, claimed he shot himself perhaps to protect the perpetrators but also as a kind of acknowledgement that he had reached a terminal point in his life. But what matters most in the film is art, explored in conversations between Vincent and his brother, Theo (Rupert Friend), his fellow artist Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac), and near the end of the film with a priest, played by Mads Mikkelsen. It's an often fascinating film in its re-creation of 19th-century Paris, Arles, and Auvers-sur-Oise, and its deft matching of scenery and people with the corresponding places and faces familiar to us from van Gogh's paintings. To my mind, cinematographer Benoît Delhomme overuses the hand-held camera to the point of inducing a kind of nausea, but perhaps the intent was to suggest the instability that van Gogh tried to turn into fixity by painting it.

Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, 1964)

Jeanne Moreau and Michel Piccoli in Diary of a Chambermaid

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Georges Géret, Daniel Ivernel, Françoise Lugagne, Muni, Jean Ozenne, Michel Piccoli. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière, based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau. Cinematography: Roger Fellous. Production design: Georges Wakhévitch. Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur.

Jeanne Moreau's aura of knowingness serves as a filter through which we view the Monteil household in Luis Buñuel's sharp-edged satire on wealth and privilege.

That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)

Fernando Rey in That Obscure Object of Desire

Mathieu: Fernando Rey
Conchita: Carole Bouquet, Ángela Molina
Édouard: Julien Bertheau
Martin: André Weber
Encarnación (Conchita's mother): María Asquerino
The Psychologist: Piéral

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Edmond Richard
Production design: Pierre Guffroy
Fernando Rey's voice dubbed by Michel Piccoli

In my comments on Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967) I expressed my attitude toward solving what some people think of as that film's riddles as "like concentrating on the threads at the expense of seeing the tapestry." And I'll stick with that. I'm not particularly interested in why Buñuel cast two actresses in the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire, or why Mathieu occasionally carries around a burlap sack, or even why the central story, of Mathieu's efforts to consummate his desire for Conchita, plays out against a background of terrorist attacks. I know that Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière toyed with the idea of multiple casting even before the film began with a single actress, Maria Schneider, in the role, and that Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina got the part after Buñuel had difficulties working with Schneider. I know, too, that the theory has been advanced that Conchita is a terrorist and that she finally sleeps with Mathieu after he agrees to become one, too -- hence the bomb that explodes at the end of the film. (A theory that reduces a masterwork to the level of hack thriller-filmmaking.) I'm sure that someone has come up with an explanation for the burlap sack, too, along with the fly in Mathieu's drink and the mouse caught in a trap and any other incidental detail that sticks in viewers' minds and can be fitted into an elaborately reductive network of symbolism. But my ultimate response to all of these enigmatic details is delight that they are there, that they popped up in Buñuel's mind as he made the film and that he could and did get away with them. They are what keeps me coming back to Buñuel's films with renewed interest and revived delight, viewing after viewing.

Watched on Filmstruck

Danton (Andrzej Wajda, 1983)

Gérard Depardieu in Danton

Danton: Gérard Depardieu
Robespierre: Wojciech Psoniak
Éléonore Duplay: Anne Alvaro
Camille Desmoulins: Patrice Chéreau
Louis de Saint-Just: Bogusław Linda
Lucille Desmoulins: Angela Winkler

Director: Andrzej Wajda
Screenplay: Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on a play by Stanislawa Przybyszewsa
Cinematography: Igor Luther
Production design: Allan Starski
Music: Jean Prodromidès
Costume design: Yvonne Sassinot de Nesle

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Movie costume dramas are usually moral fables, designed not so much to teach history as to illuminate current events. That's certainly the case with Andrzej Wajda's Danton, a French-Polish collaboration about the power struggle between Danton and Robespierre that put an end to the first phase of the French Revolution and paved the way for the rise of Napoleon. Wajda intentionally cast French actors as Danton and his followers and Polish actors as Robespierre and his partisans, suggesting a similarity of Robespierre's suppression of free speech and civil liberties t that of the Soviet puppet government in contemporary Poland. But the performances allow the film to override its political allusions. Gérard Depardieu looks goofy in a powdered wig, and he knows it, but he makes a fascinating Danton, clumsily trying to win Robespierre over with an elaborate dinner and attention to such trivial details as a flower arrangement -- Robespierre likes blue, he insists -- but then angrily sweeping the dishes to the floor when Robespierre proves resistant. In the end, his powerful denunciation of what Robespierre has done to France demonstrates why Danton was such a threat to his enemy. Wojciech Psoniak's Robespierre is almost overmatched by Depardieu's Danton, but he communicates not only the character's hidebound devotion to what he sees as the aims of the Revolution but also his gradually mounting disappointment at the impending doom of his ideals. The end, in which his mistress's nephew recites the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which he has dutifully memorized, is a powerfully ironic moment, emphasizing how Robespierre's direction of the Revolution has compromised and vitiated those rights. Wajda gives his film a strong forward movement, never stalling to preach at us.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

In the middle of Certified Copy, just after the film has taken a startling narrative turn, we see a man apparently angrily berating his wife. It looks like a correlative to the tensions that seem to be building between the film's protagonists, the unnamed woman who is labeled Elle in the screenplay (Juliette Binoche) and the writer James Miller (William Shimell). But then the man turns slightly and we see that his tirade is actually directed at someone he's talking to on his mobile phone. When our protagonists talk to the man and the woman, they turn out to be an affectionate couple. (The man is played by the celebrated screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the woman by Agate Natanson.) Nothing is what it seems in Certified Copy, of course, but if you've watched any of Abbas Kiarostami's films, you're probably ready to be tricked or tantalized. That "startling narrative turn" I mentioned above completely changes our assessment of Elle and James, who begin the film as apparent strangers to each other, and then at mid-film start apparently pretending to be a married couple who, by the end of the film, are supposedly revisiting the scene of their honeymoon 15 years earlier. The pivotal scene in Certified Copy takes place in a cafe in Lusignano, where James steps outside to take a phone call. The owner's wife (Gianna Giachetti) assumes that Elle and James are a married couple and asks why they speak English with each other, since she's French. Elle doesn't set the woman straight about their relationship, and there is a sudden break in which the woman's back is turned to the camera and she whispers something we don't hear to Elle. Then, when James returns, they pretend to be (or become?) the married couple, and he speaks to her in French. There are a few tantalizing hints that they may in fact be a long-married couple reuniting after a separation, having pretended at the start of the film to be strangers to each other. There is an equally strong suggestion that they may be strangers who have discovered a mutual love of role-playing. Or there is a third possibility, that the film depict two actualities: i.e., that its first half depicts one couple and its second half the other. If so, Certified Copy resembles Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001), with its unexplained mid-film narrative disjunction, more than it does the other films about enigmatic relationships or disintegrating marriages to which it has frequently been compared: Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), and Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). The title of the film refers to the book James has written about art, in which he argues that the distinction between an "original" work of art and a copy of it is irrelevant. Consequently, Kiarostami, who wrote the screenplay with Caroline Eliacheff, plays with duplicates and mirrors throughout the film, with the help of cinematographer Luca Bigazzi. There is, for example, a wonderfully tricky shot of James standing by a motorcycle with his image reflected in a mirror inside a doorway while Elle's is reflected in the motorcycle's distorting wide-angle mirror. In short, Certified Copy is a dazzling tease of a film that gets inside your head. Whether it's more than that probably depends on how willing you are to unpack its intricacies.

Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967)

Belle de Jour is a famously enigmatic film, venturing into (and often blurring) the space between reality and fantasy, between waking life and dreams. It has led a lot of people astray, into questions like: What's buzzing in the Asian client's box that so frightens the other prostitutes in the brothel, but so satisfies Séverine (Catherine Deneuve)? Why does Séverine so often hear cats meowing? What is the Duke (Georges Marchal) doing that so shakes the coffin in which he has posed Séverine and causes her to flee into the rain? Why is Pierre (Jean Sorel) so fascinated by the wheelchair that foreshadows his fate? How much of any of this is meant to be reality? Critics have been more or less preoccupied by these and other matters of speculation and interpretation for almost 50 years. But I, for one, am content to invoke Keats's "negative capability," which he defined as the ability of an artist to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." Of course, it would be abrogating the critics' responsibility if they failed to pursue the aesthetic and moral effects of the enigmas introduced into the film by Luis Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. I'm arguing that their effect is collective and cumulative, that pursuing any one of these details in search of a definitive answer is like concentrating on the threads at the expense of seeing the tapestry. Belle de Jour is subject to all forms of analysis -- Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, Marxist, feminist, you name it -- but without exhausting its possibilities to tantalize. I think Buñuel's major achievement in the film is in sticking to his roots in surrealism without resorting to surrealist clichés: Every scene, even the obvious fantasies like the one in which Séverine is pelted with muck by Pierre and Husson (Michel Piccoli), is grounded in actuality, down to the specific address and the mundane Parisian location given to the brothel run by Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page). It's only in reflecting on the film that we begin to question which scenes are "real" and which aren't. Belle de Jour is one of those inexhaustible films that you revisit with the certain knowledge that it will look slightly different to you every time.

Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff, 1984)

I certainly don't think that Proust's In Search of Lost Time couldn't, or shouldn't, be adapted to another medium: a well-produced miniseries might well do the trick. But for all the talent involved in this adaptation of the "Swann in Love" section of Swann's Way, the return on investment is slight: an opulent trifle, a pretty picture of the Belle Époque. The most significant contributions to the film are made by its production designer, Jacques Saulnier, and its cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who keep the eye ravished even while the mind feels hunger pangs. There are some remarkable performances that make you feel that at least Proust has been read, including Fanny Ardant's Duchesse de Guermantes, Marie-Christine Barrault's wonderfully alive and vulgar Mme. Verdurin, and especially Alain Delon's Baron de Charlus. Yes, Proust's Charlus is fat where Delon is lean, but Delon's dissipated beauty -- he's like the picture of Dorian Gray when it had just begun to reflect its subject's debauchery -- and his sly appreciation of the Guermantes footmen give us something of the essential Charlus. I have a sense that Swann should be a good deal less handsome than Jeremy Irons and that Odette was not quite as sex-kittenish as Ornella Muti, but they move through their roles well even if their voices have been dubbed by French actors. (The dubbing is most noticeable in Irons's case, since his purring lisp has become so familiar over the years.) The screenplay, by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carrière, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and Schlöndorff, plucks scenes from here and there in the Search, not confined to the titular section, but fails to put it all together in a satisfying whole. If ever a case could be made for a voice-over narrator, reflecting Proust's own Narrator, I would think it would be here.

Yoyo (Pierre Étaix, 1965)

Yoyo (Philippe Dionnet) retrieves the cigarette packet his mother has sent from the trailer to his father in the car.

Even though at one point in Yoyo the character Pierre Étaix is playing resists a photographer's attempt to have him pose in Buster Keaton's porkpie hat, it's clear that Étaix worships Keaton. The film is replete with sight gags that Keaton would have loved, such as the sequence in which, while traveling down a road in a trailer pulled by a car, the characters cook up an ingenious way to pass a packet of cigarettes from the rear of the trailer to the driver's seat of the car. The story, devised by Étaix and the great Jean-Claude Carrière, is a slight one: In 1925, a millionaire lives alone in great luxury in his chateau, attended by a battalion of servants who wait on him hand and foot: When he wants to walk his dog, for example, a chauffeur drives him around the courtyard of the estate while the dog trots alongside the car on a leash. But the millionaire is silently pining for a lost love, whose image he keeps in a desk drawer. One day, a circus arrives at the estate, bringing with it the woman (Luce Klein), who is an equestrian/acrobat in the show. It also brings a small boy (Philippe Dionnet) dressed as a clown, who turns out to be the millionaire's son with the woman. When the stock market crashes in 1929, the millionaire goes bust, so he finds the woman and the boy, who is known as Yoyo, and sets out on the road with them as traveling performers. Years pass, and the boy grows up and makes his own fortune in the new medium of television, which enables him to restore the dilapidated chateau to its former glory. (The son is also played by Étaix.) What makes the film a charmer is its continuous barrage of sight gags -- as well as sound gags: The great gilded doors in the chateau squeak loudly every time they're opened, mocking their grandiosity. There are in-jokes, too: The little traveling troupe arrives in one town to find that another troupe has beat them there -- the poster for the rival troupe announces the appearance of Zampanò and Gelsomina, the characters played by Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina in La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954). At a running time of 92 minutes, Yoyo seems to me slightly overextended, but it's a welcome discovery, very much in the vein of Jacques Tati's movies -- on which Étaix worked as an assistant director. Although his film Happy Anniversary won the Oscar for best short  subject in 1963, Étaix is not as well known in the States as Tati. His Wikipedia biography seems to have been written by someone whose first language isn't English.