That Obscure Object of Desire

Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in That Obscure Object of Desire [Cet obscur objet du désir] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1976).



Fernando Rey and Ángela Molina.

Buñuel's final film, and a rich one. It departs from the anti-narrative track he was following in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty, offering a largely faithful modernization of Pierre Louÿs' novel La femme et le pantin. The two most conspicuous innovations he and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere make are the insertion of a terrorism theme (a theme initiated in the two previous films just mentioned) and, most audaciously, the device of having two different women (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) play Conchita, the lead female character. This counter-realist gesture is especially striking in that there is no pattern whatsoever as to when one actor plays Conchita rather than the other, beyond Buñuel's conscious decision to give each one roughly equal screen time, and to confine individual scenes for the most part to one actor (though this latter "rule" is broken subtly once or twice).

The accounts of how this dual casting came about are a little confusing and inconsistent, but the best I can make it out is that, after already losing Maria Schneider, who was originally slated to play Conchita but objected to all the nude scenes (despite having been naked for most of Last Tango in Paris), Buñuel grew dissatisfied with Bouquet's performance and replaced her with Molina--but then realized that, rather than having to film certain scenes all over again, he could keep the footage he had already shot and just integrate it with the new. (I have to say, as an exception to my general belief that Buñuel could do no wrong, I can't get my mind around the idea of objecting to anything whatsoever about Bouquet.)

As Buñuel has commented in interviews, his intention was emphatically not to have the two actors represent different "sides" of Conchita's personality, or anything like that. And as he has also remarked, this is a good thing, as that would have been an egregiously facile gimmick. The double casting cannot ultimately be rationalized into any psychological or symbolic system of order: it's pure anarchy, a boldly random anamorphic streak across the otherwise (mostly) conventionally representational canvas of the film.

The Phantom of Liberty

Valerie Blanco as Aliette, the missing girl in plain sight in The Phantom of Liberty [Le fantôme de la liberté] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1974).



"I'm sick of symmetry": Jean-Claude Brialy.



Doesn't everyone hang out with their sister while she plays piano naked? Adriana Asti and Julien Bertheau.

Buñuel takes the discontinuities and absurdities of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie further still. Is there any other director whose approach, after decades, veers so resolutely towards comedy? (Usually it's the other way around.) And not just comedy, but very silly comedy.

Silly probably isn't the right word, as it denotes a lack of sense, and Phantom is far from senseless. What I mean to convey is the air of almost light-hearted farce that drifts through even the most violent or melancholy moments of the film. Prisoners are lined up against a wall and shot during the French Revolution. A man is diagnosed with an incurable disease, then goes home to find out that his daughter has been reported missing. A sniper picks off pedestrians from a room in a tall building. A police prefect is arrested for disinterring his dead sister. The stuff of surrealism, to be sure. But it is interspersed with material that would be in place in one of the British Carry On films of roughly the same period (actually, I've never seen any of those, but suddenly I want to): some swingers in a hotel try to get a bawdy party going with the other guests, including a group of monks; an ineffectual police academy instructor is mocked by his students; a polite party is held in which the guests gather around a table seated on toilets.

What gives it its weight, its significance, its unmistakable potency as art? Is it simply the expectations that accompany our awareness of the director's reputation? Well, probably in part. But even that speaks for the film's audacity. As I was saying, here's a veteran filmmaker who suddenly makes forays into whimsical parlor humor. Imagine if David Lynch's next movie were a college drinking farce a la Porky's.

More than that, however, Phantom is always resistant to classification, even in its most outwardly frivolous--or somber--moments. A great deal of it has to do with the pacing: the patient, unpredictable motion from one episode to the next, and the meandering stillnesses within each one, stillnesses that neither corrode into inertia nor harden into tension. A good deal of the time there is no good explanation for why we're watching what we're watching. It seems as though the camera had been set up just in case something important were to happen, and after the shooting had ended, the importance turned out to be as much in the waiting as in the payoffs. And yet there's no hint of improvisation, not at the level of plotting and transition. Everything is stamped with the confident anticipation of coherence.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1972).

June 14th is Bloody Sergeant Day! I'm marking that on my calendar from now on.

Structurally, this resembles nothing so much as a loosely-connected string of Monty Python skits. The humor is more muted, but not really less subtle. Which is to say, it veers away from outright slapstick only to the extent necessary to maintain the illusion that realism of some sort might still be viable at any moment. The most surprising thing about the film's satire is how gentle is, relatively speaking: Buñuel never seems to have outright contempt for even the most corrupt and irresponsible of his bourgeois puppets. In fact, the most immoral of them all, the drug-smuggling ambassador from "the Republic of Miranda," played by Fernando Rey, is essentially cute. They're all cute, and at times even intrepid. In his way, Buñuel was as indulgent of the middle class he skewered as, say, Wes Anderson is now. The most appalling moment occurs when the main characters bring a chauffeur into the house and offer him a martini--so they can comment after he leaves about how he gulps it instead of sipping it. But I'm sorry, that chauffeur was a dull lout. And we all know how Buñuel felt about his martinis. The Criterion DVD includes a short in which he gives his recipe for the "Buñueloni":



I'm impressed that Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière also wrote the script for Jess Franco's The Diabolical Doctor Z, or Miss Muerte, which I commented on here last year. Whoa, check it out--also The Return of Martin Guerre, The Tin Drum, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And the Martin Guerre remake Sommersby with Richard Gere! Cat gets around.

Diary of a Chambermaid

Dominique Sauvage in Diary of a Chambermaid [Le journal d'une femme de chambre] (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1964).



Georges Géret and Jeanne Moreau.



Muni.

Very little of Buñuel's characteristic surrealism here, and what there is consists largely in the casual suggestiveness of certain images: a Little Red Riding Hood girl collecting snails in a dark forest, an old man fetishistically caressing patent leather boots even in death, a churl torturing a goose. And yet it's every bit as disorienting in its way as Viridiana or other films from the same period.

The Parisian chambermaid Celestine, as played by Jeanne Moreau, plays her cards so close to her chest that we can't tell whether she's bluffing or just doesn't know the rules. Much of the film's emotional intensity resides in how it makes us concerned not just with what decisions Celestine makes, but with her ability to discern what is at stake, to exercise ethical judgment in those areas where it coincides with erotic friction. Her motivations seem complex, conflicted, ambiguous, though it's never clear whether this uncertainty is on her side or only ours.

Buñuel (with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière) pushes the time of Octave Mirbeau's novel forward to the late twenties, when fascism in France was gaining ever more steam. This leads to a savage twist on the original ending, a twist that is both politically chilling and an occasion for Buñuel to serve a belated slap in the face to an old enemy, Jean Chiappe, the Préfet de police who banned L'Âge d'Or upon its 1930 release.

Viridiana

Silvia Pinal and Fernando Rey in Viridiana (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1961).



Carnality vs. spiritual devotion.



A perversion of the Last Supper.

Buñuel's Viridiana astounds on many levels, one of the most surprising of which is its restraint: from scene to scene, the narrative movement is almost entirely conventional. It's only cumulatively that the progression of events takes on its most strikingly surreal dimensions (as opposed to the minor surrealism of individual shots or tableaus, such as Silvia Pinal's hand reaching for a cow's teats, or the Rabelaisian beggars trashing their benefactor's mansion in the manner of profane apostles). The plot summary at IMDB ("spoiler" alert), supplied by a Swedish viewer, manages to capture the obliquity of the total plot trajectory:

Don Jaime lives alone in his manor. His wife died from a heart attack on the wedding night. He has paid the gift and education so that his wife's niece Viridiana could become a nun, and wants her to visit him for a few days before she takes her final vow. She strikingly resembles her aunt and is persuaded to take on her wedding dress. Then he asks her to marry him. When she refuses, sleeping pills are put in her coffee. Jaime only decently fondles her. One the next day she leaves but is brought back by the police. Jaime had made a trap that might lead to another marriage. He acknowledges his "bastard" son Jorge, writes a will making his manor the common property of him and Viridiana, and hangs himself. Jorge starts modernising agricultural methods. Viridana gives free food and housing to many beggars. When Jorge and Viridiana must go away to see a lawyer, the beggars succeed in entering the locked great house. They make a banquet, but eventually beat asunder many things. When the owners return, most beggars leave the house forever. But one of them binds Jorge to a wall-cupboard and tries to rape Viridiana. Jorge promises another beggar money if he kills the rapist. He does so. One later evening when all is calm Viridiana goes to Jorge.

Somehow this description is all the more accurate by virtue of its English-as-second-language-ness.

Silvia Pinal glides through the film in the title role with the aloof, static blondness of a Hitchcock heroine: in particular, the thin layer of non-responsiveness and repulsion she continually threatens to rupture makes me think of Tippi Hedren in The Birds or Marnie (which came out around the same time or a little after). The closing sequence gave me that feeling I occasionally get of excited emotional collusion with the director: "is he going to end the movie here? yes, yes, do it, end it here! he did it! he's ending it here!"

Buñuel, as was often his custom, cast people off the street in the roles of the beggars, including one mentally deranged man who gives a shatteringly disturbing performance. Bunuel's treatment of these dissheveled, incapacitated poor is entirely unsentimental, if not downright cynical: their disenfranchisement has rendered them incapable of ethical agency (whether the more privileged characters possess such agency is, of course, one of the film's provocative opacities). This is my favorite thing about Buñuel's artistic-political sensibility, actually: its conflictedness. In the interview included with the Criterion DVD, he more than once mentions his guilty love for American conveniences, for clean streets and modern amenities. If his leftism were not so often compromised by his weakness for material comfort--and its aesthetic pleasures, which he takes pains to distance himself from, but does not fool anyone--he would not be such a compelling artist. Watching him talk with his interviewer, I felt something like the affective glow of deep friendship, intermingled with a mild bemusement that can never turn into contempt, but only makes the glow burn a little brighter.