L'Âge d'Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930)

Lya Lys in L'Âge d'Or

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Artigas, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibáñez. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, based on a novel by the Marquis de Sade. Cinematography: Albert Duverger. Production design: Alexandre Trauner. Film editing: Luis Buñuel. 

Salvador Dalí was a bit of a hack, more interested in making money off of the bourgeoises he affected to mock than in advancing his art. So it was inevitable that he and Luis Buñuel would part ways, especially after Dalï turned to the right, supporting Francisco Franco and embracing Catholicism. Although their collaboration produced two extraordinary films, the 1929 short Un Chien Andalou and the feature L'Âge d'Or, it was Buñuel's career that proved to be the more lasting in terms of critical respect. And if there's anything memorable about L'Âge d'Or, it's Buñuel's ability to bring the Surrealist aesthetic to life in semi-narrative fashion. The extent of Dalí's actual contribution to the film has always been somewhat in question, especially since one target of the film's satire is the Catholic Church, which Dalí never quite abandoned before returning to it enthusiastically. The movie is essentially a series of vignettes, starting with documentary-like section on scorpions, then tracing the efforts of a couple to consummate their love, always frustrated by conventional society and religion, and concluding with an episode derived from the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, in which a group of people emerge from a castle where they have been participating in an orgy, led by a man who looks like Jesus. Bizarre images -- a cow in a bed, a woman sucking the toe of a marble statue, a cross decorated with the scalps of women, and so on -- punctuate the entire film, which is often unsettling and often very funny. The film's assault on the complacency of the bourgeoisie would become a constant in Buñuel's films, and the party scene clearly anticipates the experiences of the trapped partygoers in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). David Thomson has noted the similarity of the country house party in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939), pointing out that the gamekeeper in Renoir's film is played by Gaston Modot, who is the male half of the central couple in L'Âge d'Or, but I think we can also see its influence in such French New Wave landmarks as Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) and La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961).   

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.

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Dan O'Herlihy in Robinson Crusoe

Cast: Dan O'Herlihy, Jaime Fernández, Felipe de Alba, Chel López, José Chávez, Emilio Garabay. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Luis Buñuel, based on a novel by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Alex Phillips. Art direction: Edward Fitzgerald. Film editing: Carlos Savage, Alberto Valenzuela. Music: Anthony Collins.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those books I feel like I've read even when I haven't. Its myth, of the solitary man tormented by solitude but inwardly driven to survive, is among the more potent ones. But in a social context, it's also a fable about colonialism. Crusoe, at least in Luis Buñuel's version, is a man carrying the white man's burden, needing to master the environment and its other inhabitants. The ship that carries him to his destiny is involved in the slave trade, and one of the moments in the film that shocked me the most was when Crusoe decides to put Friday in leg shackles, which are among the items that, for some reason, he salvaged from the wreck of his ship. Even after the agony of his long solitude, when he longs to hear another human voice, his first thought when he encounters Friday is not that he has found a companion but that he's found a servant. Presuming to give Friday a name instead of learning the one we assume he must already have, Crusoe also introduces himself as "Master." Both of them must be identified by their relationship. Eventually, Crusoe recognizes Friday as friend as much as servant, admiring the skills he brings to their existence on the island, but it's also Crusoe's "civilization" to which the two men journey at the film's end, rather than remain in the world they have created for themselves. And the relinquishing of the island to the band of mutineers as punishment for their mutiny is filled with irony: Crusoe has founded a penal colony like Australia. Buñuel is acutely aware of these ironies, of course, laying them on without preachiness, just as he slyly undercuts Crusoe's religiosity by having Friday ask Crusoe an unanswerable question about the relationship between God and the devil. Dan O'Herlihy makes a fine Crusoe, in a performance that got him an Oscar nomination, and Jaime Fernández, who learned English for the part, is an excellent foil as Friday. It was Buñuel's first color film, though the print shown on the Criterion Channel suggests that it may be in need of some cleaning and restoration.

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.

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.

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

Leticia: Silvia Pinal
Edmundo Nobile: Enrique Rambal
Steward: Claudio Brook
Leandro Gomez: José Baviera
Doctor: Augusto Benedico
Sergio Russell: Antonio Bravo
Alicia de Roc: Jacqueline Andere
Colonel: César de Campo
Silvia: Rosa Elena Durgel
Lucia de Nobile: Lucy Gallardo
Alberto Roc: Enrique García Álvarez
Juana Avila: Ofelia Guilmáin
Ana Maynar: Nadia Haro Oliva
Raúl: Tito Junco
Francisco Avila: Xavier Loyà
Eduardo: Xavier Massé
Beatriz: Ofelia Montesco
Cristián Ugalde: Luis Beristáin
Rita Ugalde: Patricia Morán
Blanca: Patricia de Morelos
Leonora: Bertha Moss

Director: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Production design: Jesús Bracho
Film editing: Carlos Savage
Music: Raúl Lavista

The Exterminating Angel teeters occasionally on the brink of heavy-handed satire -- the sheep entering the now-blocked church at the film's end, for example -- but somehow Luis Buñuel always recovers his balance. I think it's because he knows that surrealism -- the movement which gave him birth -- must always be underpinned by a dutiful semi-documentary realism, that we must never be entirely sure whether the improbable characters we're encountering and the unlikely events we're witnessing are external to us or are products of our own unstable minds. Take the déjà vu effect near the beginning of the film, when we witness the guests arriving at the mansion of the Nobiles and ascending the staircase only to watch the same scene repeated almost immediately from a somewhat different angle. For a moment we wonder if the projectionist has put on the wrong reel or the film editor has forgotten to excise the repeated scene. Or perhaps we wonder if we dozed off for a second and missed something that would explain the repetition. But no, the director must be playing with us, we conclude. That, or we're trapped in his own world, just as he is to trap the guests inside a room later, never bothering to provide an explanation of the force that keeps them there. It's one of those tricks that can only work in the movies, where we, like the house guests, have gathered and found themselves unable to escape. We can choose to escape from the experience The Exterminating Angel presents to us -- nothing prevents us from leaving the theater or turning off the video -- but we don't. So there's much to be said for the observation that the house guests are us, that Buñuel's point is not just that the Spanish bourgeoisie of the Franco years were seething in their own corruption and inertia, but also that we are all trapped by something in our psyches and/or societies that limits and lames us.

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

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.

Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)

TCM this month has been running a series of movies condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, with commentary by Sister Rose Pacatte. Sister Rose doesn't have a lot of screen presence, but she does a good job of explaining why the Legion in its heyday found the movies objectionable -- and suggesting why they really aren't. It's hard to believe today that Viridiana, with its heavily moral tone, was once considered blasphemous, but ours is a day when anything sacred is routinely held up for scrutiny. It's the first work of Buñel's greatest period as writer-director, and while it doesn't quite rise to the exalted standard of Belle de Jour (1967) or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), it wrangles effectively with their topics, including middle-class morality and the repressive element of Catholicism. Silvia Pinal gives the title role credibility, moving from naïveté through disillusionment to a final note of ambiguity: Has Viridiana truly fallen from the grace she has so ardently sought? The film is also a triumph of casting, not only in the key roles of Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), Viridiana's lecherous, tormented uncle, and Jorge (Francisco Rabal), his equally lecherous but profoundly untormented bastard son, but also Margarita Lozano as Ramona, Don Jaime's and later Jorge's maid-mistress, and Teresa Rabal as Rita, Ramona's sly, sneaky daughter, And then there's the gallery of grotesques, the beggars whom Viridiana naively takes in and tries to care for. Is there a more horrifying scene than the one that culminates in Buñuel's famous parody of Leonardo's The Last Supper, in which the beggars nearly destroy Don Jaime's house, which Jorge is trying to restore? It can be argued that the avaricious Jorge gets what's coming to him, of course, but Buñuel is never as simplistic as that, viz., the deep ambiguity of the closing scene in which the virtuous Viridiana has let down her hair and forms a threesome -- at the card table but where else? -- with Jorge and Ramona.