The Luis Buñuel Project – That Obscure Object Of Desire

Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: tasteofcinema.com

Luis Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object Of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet Du Désir) (France / Spain, 1977), is an adaptation of the 1898 novel La Femme Et Le Pantin (The Woman And The Puppet) by Pierre Louÿs, which served as an effective vehicle for both Marlene Dietrich (Von Sternberg’s The Devil Is A Woman) and Brigitte Bardot (Julien Duvivier’s The Female). Once again he collaborated with Jean-Claude Carrière on the screenplay, and the basic narrative of the book is left intact. But Buñuel and Carrière nonetheless put their own irreverently surreal cast on material that had already taken some politically incorrect liberties, even in 1898.

Buñuel regular Fernando Rey is Mathieu, a wealthy, well-groomed man-about-town who becomes obsessed with a poor but pretty Spanish working girl named Conchita. He relates the story of the relationship (in flashbacks) to the other passengers of his train coach, who have just watched him dump a bucket of water on the pursuing Conchita’s head before embarking. Mathieu, who regards himself as a devoted and generous find for any woman whom he might take a fancy to, has treated Conchita to enormous amounts of attention and indulgence. Conchita, nonetheless, torments him with varying and escalating degrees of tease and denial, imploring him to not see her as a possession but as another person with her own full life and desires. By the time Mathieu boards this train, he’s seemingly done with her.

Conchita first appears as a chambermaid in Mathieu’s household, inexperienced but earnest. That evening, Mathieu wastes no time in conveying his affections towards his strikingly lovely new employee. She demurs and they part, minutes later, on seemingly flirty good terms, but Mathieu discovers the next day that Conchita has quit. Months later, while languishing in Switzerland, he encounters her again; she’s touring with some musician friends (as a dancer) and they’ve just been stiffed by their agent. He helps them out with some cash (after being oddly pranked by them), and learns where Conchita lives in Paris. He visits often, ingratiating himself with Conchita’s mother and offering them favor upon kind favor. He eventually asks Conchita’s mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage, and offers her a large financial incentive. But Conchita again refuses, feeling that Mathieu is buying off Mom instead of earning her own affections patiently and honestly, and disappears. A few months later, Mathieu and his magistrate brother Edouard (Julien Bertheau) are having lunch at a posh restaurant and discover that Conchita is the recently-hired coat-check girl. Once again reunited, Conchita agrees to live with Mathieu at his country estate.

Fernando Rey and Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: dvdactive.com

Here, at roughly the halfway point of the film, is a good spot to assess the larger context. Mathieu‘s Paris, and greater Europe for that matter, is plagued by terrorists blowing up cars, shops and restaurants, shooting dignitaries down in the streets and bombing planes. The insurgents are a vague mish-mash of lone wolves, anarchists, religious extremists and other various small groups, all with fearsome acronyms like the P.O.P., the G.R.I.F. and the O.U.T., and all allegedly in the service of the R.A.O.I.J., the Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus. Mathieu wields enough privilege and wealth to avoid most of this, but it’s an insistent background. Conchita is a fascinating character made even more complex by the famous stroke of Buñuel and Carrière’s of casting two separate actresses in the one role. Carole Bouquet – French, tall, willowy and wry, making her feature debut, seems more elegant, and somewhat regretful at denying Mathieu his way with her. Ángela Molina, an earthy and cheery Spanish actress with a bit more experience, is more extroverted and engaging, but also more directly defiant. Neither performer is used for particular consistent purposes, though – Buñuel and Carrière alternate them almost at random, a few times within the very same scene. Mathieu’s having to contend with two Conchitas adds extra complexity, and extra boundaries to negotiate. But Buñuel the surrealist is far more interested in letting created associations reverberate than in setting up specific symbols or allegorical contexts. The film is full of visual non-sequiturs: mouse traps, pet baby pigs, a fly in a cocktail. A seamstress repairs an embroidery tear on a blood-streaked piece of fabric, and there are recurring guest appearances by a burlap bag – sackcloth, perhaps?

Mathieu’s country estate is quite nice, but terrorists have disabled the nearby power station. The candlelit evening would seem to be conducive to mutual romance, and Mathieu is delighted that he can finally be intimate and alone with Conchita. But Conchita is adamant about protecting her chastity; he can be as intimate as he likes, but she won’t surrender that. (“Just wait a little while longer. You know I’m yours and yours alone. What more do you want?”) Days go by, they spend lovely recreational days together in Paris, but she still insists on remaining chaste. One night after being turned down again, Mathieu discovers that Conchita’s musician friend has been sleeping over with her in the other room after being tossed out of his hotel. (“But don’t worry, we slept back to back – exactly as I do with you!”). Mathieu throws her out, but he’s irretrievably smitten. He has Edouard use his connections to get Conchita and her mother deported back to Seville, but he then pursues them there anyway. He becomes more obsessive, more pos-sessive, and she continues to profess her love while making him jump through more increasingly demeaning hoops. “I belong to no one, and I am my most precious possession.”

Ángela Molina in “That Obscure Object Of Desire.” credit: pinterest.com

Mathieu is the protagonist here, and in seeing the relationship through his eyes  we’re naturally sympathetic to his frustrations concerning Conchita. But Buñuel, throughout the film, is just as much on Conchita’s side, and is clearly admiring of her self-protective tendencies; there’s no evidence that Mathieu wouldn’t toss her over if given his full indulgences. It’s why she won’t ask him for money; as long as he sees it as a means to his end, he’ll always give it to her anyway. He’ll pay her and Mom’s rent, she can have a room on his country estate, he’ll buy her a small villa in Seville. She meets his frustrations with cruelty, and vice-versa; at one point he strikes her, repeatedly, and, face bloodied, she responds with “Now I know you love me.” Conchita’s reaction may distress us these days (it distressed some back then), but it’s true to Louÿs’ book – after this episode, it’s definitely her pursuing him now – but Buñuel uses this moment to obscure things further; is this another manipulative tactic, or is she truly relenting? Has he done enough for her by now to earn her acquiescence? The privileged Mathieu never changes throughout the entire story, but Conchita has no choice but to strive,  adapt, and oftentimes submit, in order to keep a roof over her head, food in her mouth, and love in her modest life. By the time we end up back on that train, though, near the end, it’s pretty clear what each of them know they need, and how pointlessly, even maliciously, they’re willing to treat each other in order not to just admit that to each other. The terrorists are the least of our problems, some might say – just look what we do to each other. And Luis Buñuel has a good laugh at our expense, again…

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Phantom Of Liberty

“I experience in every event that my thoughts and my will are not in my power. And that my liberty is only a phantom.” – The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée)

Luis Buñuel’s earlier religious-themed films (arguably most of them in some manner, but Nazarin, Viridiana, Simon Of The Desert, and The Milky Way primarily) were critical of the uses to which ‘civilizing’ moral structures and institutions (like the church, colonialism and governments) were put. Other, later films expressed the tug-of-war between social strata (peasants, workers, the educated middle-class, clergy and the wealthy), and how each represented character exercised, or denied themselves, their own free will (Viridiana, The Diary Of A Chambermaid, Belle De Jour, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie). While Discreet Charm…, at the time, was a provocative black comedy quite unlike most others, I found that its subsequent imitations, homages and extrapolations quickly dated it. Luckily, I didn’t have remotely as many of those problems with The Phantom Of Liberty (Le Fantôme De La Liberté) (France, 1974), which I regard as a superb distillation, and extension, of many of Buñuel’s most engaging and thought-provoking tendencies.

Jean-Claude Brialy and Monica Vitti in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit:askhelmut.com

The film begins with two of Buñuel’s favorite reference points – Francisco Goya’s famous “Third Of May 1808” painting (where Spanish resistance fighters face a French-Napoleanic firing squad), and Jose Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio, (the haunting of Don Juan by both Dona Elvira, who died of heartbreak after he abandoned her, and her father, Don Gonzalo, whom Don Juan murdered when he left her). We see the resistance fighters, defiant in the face of the rifles, but they’re crying “Death To Liberty!” and “Long Live The Chains!”, typically surreal contradictions. (Inveighing against their genuine better interests – does that sound oddly familiar..?) The statues of Don Gonzalo and Dona Elvira are prominent in the ransacked church the French encamp within, and a soldier, chowing down on communion hosts, drunkenly flirts with her statue, only to be mysteriously bonked on the head by the stone hand of Don Gonzalo. Furious, injured, but probably still drunk, he digs up the grave of Dona Elvira and finds her miraculously well-preserved in her coffin, which enables the defiling soldier to… be abruptly cut away from, as a nanny now reads from the play in a 20^th century park in Paris.

Somewhat similar in structure to The Milky Way and Discreet Charm…, Phantom’s episodes seem far more free-associative and self-contained. Once an idea is expressed, and a point has been made, the narrative will veer abruptly in a new unpredictable direction. A man has trouble recognizing his wife on the street – he suspects sleeping problems and sees a doctor, whose nurse must interrupt their session to tell the doctor she needs a few days off. We then follow her out of the office rather than continuing with the patient. Buñuel and co-creator Jean-Claude Carrière, by this time, shared a familiar common language of dreams, tall tales and philosophies, and here they have wicked fun subverting standard narrative cause-and-effect, one-thing-follows-another structures. Where The Milky Way relied on its picaresque on-the-road scenario, and Discreet Charm… depended on the arc of the privileged ‘diners’ inability to determine their own fates, Phantom relies purely on how its characters react to their own perceptions of reality under quite varied circumstances.

Anne-Marie Deschodt, Michael Lonsdale and Milena Vukotic in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit: legrandaction.com

Our visitor to the doctor dreams of a rooster, a postman, and an ostrich, but actually has the piece of mail the postman gave him in the dream. The doctor’s nurse goes to a small country inn, meets a group of Carmelite brothers who help her pray for her sick mother, and ends up drinking, smoking and playing poker with them. Invited to another room, they all leave in disgust when an S&M couple starts indulging themselves, but the dominated man is upset and surprised that the monks aren’t staying. A professor comes to a police academy to lecture on Laws and Customs, but the officers relentlessly prank him like bullying children. Off the professor goes to dinner, where the table is surrounded by toilets and set with magazines and ashtrays; if you want to eat dinner, you go into a private room where you’ll be undisturbed. A man learns he has cancer, slaps his doctor when offered a cigarette, and tells his wife at home that he’s fine. The couple then learns that their daughter is missing! They hurry to the school to get the news from the teachers (while the daughter, Aliette, stands beside them), then angrily report the abduction to the police (with Aliette sitting next to them in the office). (“You did well to bring her. It helps,” says the police captain as he’s filling out her missing persons form.) A sniper guns down Parisians from the Tour Montparnasse building, is arrested, tried and sentenced to death. He is now, of course, free to go. A woman in a bar reminds a man, the police commissioner, of his long-dead sister. The long-dead sister then phones him at the bar. He’s later arrested for trying to open her grave and must face – the police commissioner. Together, the two of them go to the zoo to arrange… a firing squad…

Ellen Bahl, Pascale Audret, Jean Rochefort and Claude Piéplu (with Valerie Blanco) in “The Phantom Of Liberty.” credit: katushka.net

Much of the unexpectedness or incongruity of these situations hinges on the exercise of personal choice, or the following, or rejection, of social and moral standards. But who sets the standards in the first place? Buñuel, here in his 70s, had lived long enough to see political terrorists become celebrities, poverty-stricken people vote for their oppressors, and the pendulum of sexual liberation swinging back towards repression. The important difference for Buñuel was his graciousness – he never demeaned or made careless fun of his characters. No matter how far from someone else’s idea of logic or order or common sense they strayed, he always found common cause with their basic humanity.

This film certainly ranks near the top of my Luis Buñuel Project, but many would argue his last film is the real masterpiece. We’ll find out soon…

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: wondersinthedark.wordpress.com

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (Le Charme Discret De La Bourgeoisie) (France, 1972) was the Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner in 1973. Academy members had been no doubt watching Luis Buñuel’s career throughout the sixties – the films are always entertaining, in their particular ways – and now they had finally found one of his films that didn’t feature poverty, disfigurements, sexual fetishes, outright blasphemy or homages to the Marquis de Sade. A winner! But simmering here underneath the narrative’s overt drawing-room-comedy aspects are Buñuel’s (and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière‘s) usual darkly surrealist conceits regarding sex, death and dreams.

The film is a series of episodes where a group of friends attempt to sit down together and have a proper meal. There’s Don Raphael (Fernando Rey), an ambassador to a fictional Latin American country, M. and Mme. Thévenot (Paul Frankeur and Delphine Seyrig), Mme. Thévenot’s younger sister Florence (Bulle Ogier), and the Sénéchals, Henri and Alice (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran). But they arrive for a friend’s dinner on the wrong night. Or they discover the restaurateur has passed away and is lying in state in the adjoining dining room. Or a seemingly busy café is out of tea. And coffee. And milk. Or a military squad on war exercises arrives and must eat first. The interruptions become sillier, and/or darker, and/or more abstract as the narrative moves along. But it’s what’s revealed about the characters along the way that gives the film its subversive frisson. Between social engagements, the three men are active in the international cocaine trade. Don Raphael is stalked by a pretty female ‘terrorist’ selling stuffed animals (whom of course quickly becomes desaparecido thanks to two of his agents), and he is often asked about the allegedly miserable and corrupt conditions of his small country, which he amiably denies. The Thévenot’s are gourmand connoisseurs; she poring over menu choices or guessing dishes from the kitchen smells, while he goes on and on about his own delicious caviar supplies or his making the perfect martini while demonstrating that the working class is too unrefined to be allowed to drink them. “There’s nothing more relaxing than a dry martini,” he states. “I read it in a woman’s magazine.” The sister, Florence, is perky and charming, but prone to overindulgence in the aforementioned martinis. The Sénéchals are textbook social companions – there’s no indication of what they do for a living or where their contentedness springs from, but dinners are usually at their place, provided by a kitchen full of domestics, except on the rare occasion where Henri and Alice sneak down their own back trellis to have sex with each other in the backyard behind the bushes, while their guests wait to be served…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: archive-cinema.tumbler.com

Each potential meal with the six becomes its own little parlor drama, but some of them feature other guests as well. Monsignor Dufour (Julien Bertheau) is the presiding local bishop, but nothing makes him happier than gardening for the Sénéchals on the side. A young soldier in the out-of-everything café, apropos of nothing, narrates a grisly ghost story of familial betrayal and retribution. A sergeant in the military squad relates a dream he had about meeting dead friends on a quiet city street. Then, gradually, our main characters’ exploits start slipping into dreams as well. The military-squad Colonel (Claude Piéplu) invites all to dinner at his place, but his whisky is cola, the chickens are rubber, and his dining room turns out to be a stage in a theater, with a booing, whistling audience deriding them all for not knowing their ‘lines.’ Then Henri Sénéchal wakes up… to go to the Colonel’s for dinner, where he witnesses Don Raphael arguing with the Colonel over insults to his country, and then shooting him in fury. And then M. Thévenot wakes up. It doesn’t all dissolve into dreams, though – Monsignor Dufour is called to the side of a dying man for last rites, only to discover the man is the killer of Dufour’s own parents. Should he absolve him or avenge them? If only this could be a dream…

Speaking of crime, the intrepid Inspector Delecluze (François Maistre) breaks the case of the cocaine-smuggling diplomat, and promptly arrests Don Raphael and his five accomplices just as they’re sitting down to dinner. (*gasp!*) Delecluze dreams of a bloody, ghostly sergeant letting prisoners free at night, and, now awake, he receives a call from an interior minister ordering him to free his arrestees. Freed, they sit down to dinner again. But now there are gangsters with machine guns…

“The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie.” credit: 1001plus.blogspot.com

A genuine surrealist, Luis Buñuel rarely trafficks in outright allegory or symbolism. He, rather, sets up a series of recurring associations, and hopes that you’ll draw a lot of the same impressions and conclusions that he has. But, if that doesn’t happen, he’ll work hard to have, at least, entertained you anyway. Overlapping dreams, irony and surprise, stagey and stylized sex and violence, and even a soundtrack that interrupts its own characters are familiar devices these days, but Buñuel and Carrière were true masters at inventing and employing them. The film overall seems remarkably tame these days, almost half-hearted compared to the comedies and satires that ensued over the following 45 years, inspired by work like this. But there are still very few films that are even remotely like these late Buñuel films. Indulge.

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Milky Way and Tristana

Luis Buñuel’s films are of such gracious curmudgeonly humor, intelligence and narrative creativity that it’s easy to mistake his lesser efforts for ‘disappointments.’ It’s a trap I’m afraid I caught myself falling into upon viewing his two late-sixties works, The Milky Way and Tristana. Wonderful films like Nazarin, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Belle De Jour are quite singular creations; thoughtfully rigorous narratives expressed clearly and efficiently, with little patience for manipulative sentiment or lesson-learned false earnestness. I found The Milky Way and Tristana to be a little re-hashed, a little formulaic in their individual ways – more interesting and admirable than genuinely provocative or entertaining. But, honestly, we’re still working in a pretty rare league of filmed storytelling here; not only did Buñuel (born in 1900) make these films while entering his seventies, but the three films that followed these are flat-out masterpieces.

The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée) (France, 1969) is similar to 1965’s Simon Of The Desert – an entertaining survey and critique of Christian beliefs and dogma. Buñuel collaborates here with Jean-Claude Carrière to create an archetypical road movie. The film follows two “kings of the road,” an older, grizzled Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and his young and skeptical traveling pal Jean (Laurent Terzieff), whom are making the traditional humble pilgrimage from central France to the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, where the holy remains of St. James are allegedly preserved. But they’re not going for their spiritual health or historical edification – they’re looking to make some money, begging for alms and taking advantage of the tourist trade there. The film clearly begins in the motorized present day, but as our pilgrims make their picaresque progress, they encounter a variety of characters and situations seemingly transplanted from different periods of history.

Bernard Verley in “The Milky Way.”  credit: cinema-francais.fr

Episodically, Buñuel and Carrière explore six major tenets of Christianity, and the ‘heresies’ thereof that arose in opposition: the Eucharist – communion and transubstantiation (the wine and host/wafer becoming the blood and body of Christ); the distinction between Good and Evil, extrapolated as spiritual/physical, the soul and the body, subjective and objective; the dual nature of Christ as both human man and divine being; the concept of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit); the conflict between Grace and Freedom, and the assertion or sublimation of Free Will; and the mystery of the nature of The Virgin Mary.  But, of course, there’s nothing doctrinaire about Buñuel’s presentations – an explanation of transubstantiation, and a dismissal of those who doubt, is delivered by a mischievous priest who ends up being apprehended by the white-coated attendants from the hospital he escaped – again. The heretic bishop Priscillian, addressing a small crowd of medieval acolytes, explains that our bodies are the creation of the Devil – only our souls are divine – which, based on those priorities, leads to a medieval acolyte orgy. The snooty maître d’ at an elegant provincial restaurant is happy to extol the teachings of Jesus, the man and the God, to his fellow workers, while giving the boot to Pierre and Jean’s humble request for scraps. At one point we even leave our two travelers and follow the other adventures of two young Protestant students (Denis Manuel and Daniel Pilon), heckling a bishop over the Trinity, exchanging identities with two hunters in the woods, and receiving seemingly mystical visitations in the woods and within their hotel rooms. Early in the film, a mysterious caped figure instructs Pierre and Jean to have their way with a whore, who will bear them children. As the film concludes, our travelers are indeed waylaid by the Whore of Babylon (Delphine Seyrig), who expresses her wish to have their children, and their destination is quickly forgotten. And peppered amongst these instructional chapters are appearances and observations from the Marquis de Sade, a persuasive lightning-bolt, a Spanish inquisitor, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus himself, hangin’ with his buds and casually dropping miracles here and there, with varying degrees of success..

Paul Frankeur, Laurent Terzieff and Pierre Clementi in ‘The Milky Way.” credit: fr.film-cine.com

Buñuel would employ this omnibus / series of satirical sketches format in his later films as well; after the explosion of sketch-comedy shows like Monty Python and SCTV and The Young Ones, etc., The Milky Way doesn’t feel like a precursor and model for much of that, even though it is, clearly. At one point, a Jesuit and a Jansenist actually take swords up to duel over the nature of Grace and Predetermination  – they shout religious academic arguments at each other between parries and thrusts – and one could easily picture Eric Idle and Graham Chapman in their places.

Laurent Terzieff, Delphine Seyrig and Paul Frankeur in “The Milky Way.” credit: kebekmac.blogspot.com

I vastly prefer when Buñuel illustrates his rich views of fickle human nature and institutionalized belief systems within a larger narrative (Nazarin, Viridiana, Diary Of A Chambermaid) rather than creating a linear plot that simply becomes the delivery device for the overt points he wants to make. Simon Of The Desert wasn’t supposed to be as short as it ended up being, but its brevity works to the film’s advantage; just as we start to feel a little lectured-to, things wrap up. With The Milky Way, Buñuel got to spend more time in the candy store, and some of the segments overstay their welcome – a lengthy scene at a rural girls’ school picnic is oddly humorless, and weirdly (but thankfully)  interrupted by Jean’s own reverie of a group of armed anarchists assassinating the Pope. Later, a friendly Spanish priest goes on and on and on about the Virgin Mary, relating a fairly interesting miracle story at first, and then intrusively prattling on from the opposite side of closed doors after everyone else has called it a night. Buñuel delights in exposing the ulterior motives of these self-interested, self-promoting clerics, but it all feels a bit overindulged.

So I was looking forward to seeing Buñuel’s Tristana (France, 1970), another adaptation of a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós, whom had given us Nazarin and Viridiana. It tells the story of Don Lope (Fernando Rey), a wealthy Spanish nobleman who becomes the guardian of Tristana (Catherine Deneuve), a young girl whose widowed mother dies unexpectedly. Generally respected by the clubby male Toledo community, he’s a profligate roué – a trust-fund baby – who wastes little time in having his way with the passive and deferential orphan girl under the guise of fatherly propriety, and later as husband’s prerogative. “Your mother was very good, but not so very intelligent… You never enjoyed your father’s wealth – he lost it all when you were very young.” But as Tristana grows and enriches herself under the higher-class milieu that the Don has provided her, she develops an independent streak and ultimately chooses to run off with the artist Don Horatio (Franco Nero). But Don Lope has tutored her well in self-indulgent non-commitment, whether she’s aware of it or not, and her co-dependence is profound – she and the artist never marry, and when a nasty tumor from a mysterious disease (am I out of line to suspect syphilis here?) leads to the amputation of her leg, she returns to the house of Don Lope to languish and, eventually, take revenge on him.

Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve in “Tristana.” credit: 50anosdefilmes.com.br

Catherine Deneuve frequently cites Tristana as one of her most satisfying performances, and it’s easy to see why. Tristana’s transformation – from doe-eyed orphan schoolgirl to She Who Must Be Served, dressed in black, strutting out of her perfunctory church-marriage to Don Lope with cane and prosthetic leg, and attended to in her wheelchair by the housekeeper’s deaf-mute son – is the best part of the film. The rest is a surprisingly conventional melodrama, although there are some hints of Buñuel’s usual stew of psychology and fetish. The very first scene introduces us to Saturna (Lola Gaos, excellent here), Don Lope’s housekeeper, taking Tristana out for a walk to get her out of the house (and enliven her near-cloistered life under Don Lope), but stopping off to check on her deaf-mute son, Saturno (Jesús Fernández), who continually acts out anger at his school. (Saturna and Saturno – hard not to think of Goya here…). Even at this early stage, only minutes into the film, we have a glimpse of Tristana’s bond with Saturno as a fellow outsider, and as a potential partner in crime – after the headmaster scolds him for getting into a fight during a football match, she gives him an apple. Uncharacteristically, Buñuel opts for outright symbolism throughout, rather than his more ambiguous but resonant surrealist perspective. Tristana has a recurring dream about Don Lope’s decapitated head acting as the clapper of a giant church bell, but beyond that touch of absurdity it’s all, disappointingly, Freud and mythology.

Catherine Deneuve in “Tristana.” credit: cinedivergente.com

Later on, The Milky Way became the first film of what Buñuel and Carrière eventually fashioned into a trilogy (The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie and The Phantom Of Liberty followed, and both relied on that same format of a series of disparate episodes across a linear narrative). Discreet Charm involves a group of wealthy people trying to have dinner together. Phantom seems like a random series of dream sketches, but is unified by Buñuel and Carrière’s observation of how short-sighted the characters are, and how they all seem to exist in a self-serving, vacuum-sealed eternal present, despite the historical and philosophical signifiers surrounding them throughout. It’s the most surreal of his later films – rough going for the uninitiated, but quite wonderful.

As for Tristana, I’ve seen suggestions elsewhere that it’s actually a good place to start if you’ve never seen a Buñuel film, and I’d agree with that. Just about any of his other 60s films are much better, but Buñuel always serves Pérez Galdós well, and vice-versa. And it’s one of my favorite Deneuve performances. While not as conceptually rigorous as the others, Tristana is a good example of what I’d call Buñuel’s gracious misanthropy – he’s unstinting in showing us the blithering follies we consign ourselves to socially, morally and philosophically, but he almost always evinces empathy as well. “There but for the grace of God…?”

The Luis Buñuel Project – Belle De Jour

Back in 2011, when Bertrand Bonello’s L’Apollonide, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty and Steve McQueen’s Shame were all released, I cited Luis Buñuel’s Belle De Jour (France, 1967) as one of their primary progenitors. Belle De Jour is a turn-of-the-century novel by Joseph Kessel that Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière adapted for producers Raymond and Robert Hakim. They didn’t like the book much, but saw numerous openings for addressing their own far-more-interesting concerns within the potboiler framework of Kessel’s story.

Catherine Deneuve in “Belle De Jour.” credit: mubi.com

It’s the tale of Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), who has just married a handsome surgeon, Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel), in what would seem to be an idyllic marriage. But Séverine is terrified of consummating – she even insists they sleep in twin beds. Nonetheless, she’s haunted by sado-masochistic dreams, and when she learns that a married mutual acquaintance is leading a secret second life as a prostitute, she’s compelled to take the plunge herself. Buñuel’s (and Carrière ‘s) depiction of Séverine, her clients, her working situation, and the divergence between her shame and her sexual awakening covers an enormous range of cultural, psychosexual, and psychoanalytical territory within a surrealistic context that never really allows us to pin down what’s real and what’s simply Séverine’s fantasy/dream life.

The idea of wanting to be dominated by someone, behaviorally and/or sexually, isn’t new or novel, but it clearly doesn’t make for standard dinnertime conversation, either. Pierre is a passive gentlemanly great guy – he doesn’t recognize Séverine’s no-may-not-mean-no neediness, and she’s too shy, and too lacking in self-awareness, to be able to spell it out for him. Séverine is OK making general conversation with Pierre about her dreams – she imagines them as a romantic couple in a horse-drawn coach – but understandably withholding on the details – you have the coachmen whip me, and then you give me to one of them. Another couple they’re acquainted with, Séverine’s close friend Renee (Macha Meril) and her companion Husson (Michel Piccoli), provide an instructive contrast – there’s a lot about Husson that Renee clearly loathes, and yet they remain a couple. We might imagine Husson – furtive, egotistical and predatory – to be darkly intriguing to Séverine, but she recognizes, and is repelled by, his selfish know-it-all indulgence, his forthright brandishing of the Male Prerogative. And yet it’s Husson who refers her to the ‘salon’ of Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), where she embarks on her part-time career of carnal self-discovery.

“Belle De Jour.” credit: bdsmmoviereview.com

And so Buñuel’s film becomes a psychological mystery of sorts, presenting Séverine as a normal person trying to solve an important problem.  He’s clearly sympathetic to Séverine’s dilemma, and her (ironically circular) attempts to throw off the bourgeois moral programming that’s keeping her from being a good bourgeois wife. What must she learn? What will liberate her? What must she rid herself of? Her fellow workers, Charlotte and Mathilde (Françoise Fabian and Maria Latour), are there for purely practical economic reasons, but it’s clear that Séverine doesn’t need the money. Various clients set off various psychological triggers; Séverine is sour on clients that Charlotte and Mathilde like and are used to – a travelling salesman, a submissive gynecologist, but finds herself game for rougher trade – an Asian man who brings a unique accessory, a Duke lamenting the death of his daughter, and the punkish protégé of a longtime gangster (Francisco Rabal). It’s he, the thuggish Marcel (Pierre Clémenti) , who seems to embody the perfect combination of condescension, aggressiveness and erotic regard that cracks open Séverine’s own awareness and agency as a fully sexual self-possessed adult. It even improves her marriage. But her assignations with Marcel set off a series of unintended consequences, and the film ends on an ambivalent, open-ended note of tragic irony, still shot through with dreamy incongruence.

Buñuel’s film is full of little symbols and surrealist non sequiturs. “Pierre, please, don’t let the cats out!” Séverine exclaims during her coachmen’s flogging, and, at particular points in the narrative we hear yowling cats in the background, as well as the jingling bells of that horse-drawn coach, irrespective of what’s actually happening visually in the frame. (It’s a little subliminal sonic trick that Jean-Luc Godard is fond of as well.) There are also visual signifiers that express Séverine’s transition from passive adolescent to active adult. Weekending at a ski resort, Séverine inexplicably carries a small stuffed animal that she surrenders to a maître d’ before meeting up with Renee and Husson. Meeting the Duke at an elegant outdoor café, she drinks a glass of milk. Physically and emotionally addled (yet thrilled) by the idea of prostituting herself, she finds herself dropping an enormous vase of flowers and a bottle of perfume, and her walking movements take on a skittering, coltish quality. And there’s a whole other article to be written just on the evocative choices Yves Saint Laurent made with Buñuel in designing Séverine / Ms. Deneuve’s wardrobe in the film, from her red travelling suit to her white cashmere tennis sweater to her charcoal-gray overcoat to the lingerie…ahh, the lingerie…

Catherine Deneuve and Geneviève Page in “Belle De Jour.” credit: ellefrances.blogspot.com

This may still be, today, one of the least-explicit-yet-most-erotic films ever made. There’s plenty of nudity in 60s European cinema, and Buñuel wasn’t averse to employing it in later films. But everything here has a kind of decorum – Séverine’s clients are more apt to instruct her on what she should leave on than what she can take off. Buñuel is touchingly respectful of Séverine, and doesn’t presume the kind of exposing intimacy he’d use later in That Obscure Object Of Desire. There’s ritual to the Intimacies here; Séverine asks Pierre about whorehouses, and he’s hushed but honest. Madame Anaïs runs her business breezily, plays cards and wisecracks with Charlotte and Mathilde, but relates to, and instructs, Séverine with ardent focused urgency. The shot of Séverine after her session with the Asian client, lifting herself off of the bed, is iconic. It’s all about desire sought, desire found, desire acted on, desire transporting us, desire getting us into trouble. And nothing makes Luis Buñuel happier than exploring the kinds of desires that get all of us into trouble.

Pierre Clémenti in “Belle De Jour.” credit: elli-medeiros.com

The Luis Buñuel Project – Simon Of The Desert

Simon Of The Desert. credit: dvdbeaver.com

Sometimes, when a director makes the film that summarizes the concerns he or she has previously dealt with in earlier work, it’s not a particularly successful film. I’m thinking here of films like Scorsese’s Casino – which is a much less successful film than Goodfellas, or even Wolf Of Wall Street, in paradoxically blurring the lines between corruption and commerce – or David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, which presents pop-cultural distortions of subjective reality that were far better thought out in Videodrome. As admirable as both of those films were, there’s a feeling of repetition, of specific ideas not necessarily fleshed-out in the earlier films that are nonetheless better served by their ambiguity than their re-examination.

And so it is with Luis Buñuel’s Simon Of The Desert (Simón Del Desierto) (Mexico, 1965), a crisply episodic survey of Buñuel’s doting disdain for Catholicism, Christianity and religious fervor in general. Like his earlier Nazarin, Buñuel can’t help but give grudging but honest respect to the single-mindedness of his protagonist, the 4^th century Syrian devotee Simon Stylites (Buñuel regular Claudio Brook). Simon was eventually canonized for his 37-year residence atop a pillar in the desert, about 1 meter square – locals would climb a ladder to bring him food and water, which he accepted coyly. Most of the time he would pray in solitude, or, when small crowds did gather, he would preach to them, even though, early in the film, he demurs an offer to be ordained as a priest – “I am an unworthy sinner.”

The film is then a series of individual encounters between Simon and his various followers and visitors: regally bedecked clerics, modest acolytes, his forlorn mother (keeping a Mary-like vigil), various local peasants, and, inevitably, the Devil itself, in the form of another Buñuel favorite, the fetching Mexican actress Silvia Pinal. In some cases, Simon’s devotion seems to be wasted – a thief’s chopped off hands are miraculously restored through Simon’s prayers, and the first thing the man does with them is slap his young daughter upside her head. Other times Simon’s own standards translate to a series of pointless recommendations for his Christian peers – he advises a young monk to grow a beard, not to bathe, and parade his poverty.  “Man is the most despicable of your creatures, Lord!” he laments, but does man not measure up to God’s standards, or Simon’s?

The Devil’s first appearance is a silent one – she simply walks across the frame carrying a jug of water on her shoulder. Simon notes that the woman is one-eyed – when a young monk corrects him (she clearly has the normal two), Simon upbraids the young man’s observation as immodest ogling. Her second appearance is as a pinafore-wearing schoolgirl, sing-songing a derisive little ditty about Simon while exposing her legs and breasts. This direct approach proves to be counterproductive, and she regroups. Next she possesses one of the elder clerics, who spouts a series of blasphemies that even the bishops aren’t familiar with. (“What is apocastasy?” one asks the other – the reply is a puzzled shrug.) The other elders haul him off, but Simon’s not worried about him – he wants the boy with no beard thrown out of the monastery, and the elders comply with this as well. The dejected boy, now homeless, must rely on his acquaintance with a peasant dwarf with an unhealthy attraction towards his goat. The Devil’s next appearance is as Christ the Shepherd, and initially Simon believes this ruse. But the Devil can’t help herself, imploring him to come down from the pillar to indulge in the revels of the flesh.  It’s another failure – Simon 3, Devil 0. But this visit has weakened Simon’s resolve, and, as penance, he resolves to only stand on one foot. He’s starting to forget the ends of prayers, and absent-mindedly starts blessing bugs and bits of lettuce he picks out of his teeth. For her final visit, she arrives in a gliding coffin, likes a Bugs Bunny tunnel racing across the sand, and simply declares that they’re leaving. “Between you and me, there are only few differences. As you, I believe in Almighty God, because I enjoyed His presence.” Where they go and how they get there I’ll leave to you to discover.

Silvia Pinal and Claudio Brook in ‘Simon Of The Desert.’ credit: midnightonly.com

Like Father Nazario in Nazarin, Simon has all the right intentions, but that which he thinks is bringing him closer to God is the very thing that removes him from the rest of his fellow humanity. He thinks he’s setting an example, but his example is the very thing that distances his fellow humans from God, or, at least, the dogmatic organized-religious God. The Devil’s strategy doesn’t seem very committed or persistent, but she knows that Simon is unwittingly doing a lot of her work for her already. This is Buñuel’s frequent point – creating a worthwhile, ethical life for oneself in the empirical, quotidian world is hard enough without all of these judgmental snobs constantly telling you that you’re doing it all wrong, and that you should deny yourself the small pleasures that you’ve come up with on your own for some ephemeral bigger reward after death.

It’s a likable, watchable, amusing and instructive film, but it plays more like a list of lessons than a real-world narrative artfully tilted by Buñuel’s surreal touches. And problems with producer Gustavo Alatriste resulted in a very abrupt ending – they just flat-out ran out of money. It’s definitely worth seeing – many declare this to be their favorite Buñuel, based on the clarity of the message and the efficient 45-minute running time – but it’s admittedly not one of my favorites. Luckily, there’s a slew of consecutive masterpieces on the way.

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Diary Of A Chambermaid

Jeanne Moreau in ‘Diary Of A Chambermaid.’

Often regarded as one of his least surreal films, Luis Buñuel’s The Diary Of A Chambermaid (Le Journal D’Une Femme De Chambre) (France, 1965) is based on Octave Mirbeau’s 1900 novel of the same name. Inevitably it’s compared to Jean Renoir’s English-language treatment in 1946; Mr. Renoir had the services of Paulette Goddard as Celestine, the chambermaid, and an adapted screenplay by the omni-talented young Burgess Meredith which shifted much of Mirbeau’s narrative decidedly in the direction of drawing-room comedy before Mirbeau’s darker elements belatedly hold sway. But Buñuel’s own treatment uses the “Diary” as a commentary on the moral relativism and survivalist opportunism that life in the 20^th century has inevitably engendered. Buñuel’s surrealism here isn’t overtly visual or structural – it’s a very handsomely-shot film (even more impressive considering it was his first film in the 2.35:1 wide-screen format) with a naturalistic look and narrative. But the same foundational skepticism that informed Dada and Surreal art post-World War I – the institutionalization of savagery and inequality for ostensible political purposes, and the complicity of the citizenry ultimately subjected to it – runs underneath Buñuel’s vision of Mirbeau’s milieu. Like Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), the “documentary” presentation of the miserable living conditions of Spain’s Hurdano valley, Buñuel shows us some pretty insufferable aspects of provincial privilege, the ‘eccentricities’ of the landed gentry, and their willful dismissal of incipient sociopathy, and seems to be asking us how we could even consider, then or now, tolerating it.

Jeanne Moreau is Buñuel’s Celestine here, and, not too far unlike Goddard’s portrayal, she balances a canny mix of deference to her employers, condescension for their provincialism and an opportunistic eye towards her own interests. The lady of the house, Mme. Monteil (Françoise Lugagne) is pinched and humorless, and gives Celestine a short tour of which objects to fuss over and which not to break or ruin. We soon learn that Mme. Monteil has a mysterious ailment that prevents her from having consistent intimate relations with Monsieur Monteil – her bathroom, which Celestine never enters, is a tiny laboratory of elixirs, powders and injection and/or purgation devices. This, of course, leaves Mr. Monteil (the always reliable Michel Piccoli) with a permanently deranging case of blue-balls that he has notoriously self-treated with Celestine’s predecessors. Piccoli portrays Monteil as an overwound (yet oddly hilarious) nervous wreck, terrible at hunting on his own estate and indignantly furious at his derisive retired-military-Captain neighbor (Daniel Ivernel) – his clumsy flirtations with Celestine are almost comically hard to watch. The Monteils, nonetheless, are devoted to Monsieur Rebour, Madame’s father (Jean Ozenne), from whence their manner-to-which-they-are-accustomed has originated. He’s actually a pleasantly elegant older gentleman that Celestine likes; Buñuel’s reading of Mirbeau’s book was most certainly enlivened for him when he discovered Monsieur Rebour’s ardent shoe fetish (“That was a wonderful afternoon little Luis spent on the floor of his mother’s closet, and he has never allowed us to forget it,” noted Pauline Kael), and Celestine is coyly but amiably inclined to indulge it while reading J.K. Huysmans aloud to him (“It takes a good dose of goodwill to suppose that the ruling classes are respectable, and the lower classes worthy of relief or commiseration…”).

Jeanne Moreau and Jean Ozenne in ‘Diary Of A Chambermaid.’

Mirbeau’s, Renoir’s and Buñuel’s darkest character is the caretaker Joseph (Georges Géret), a devoted (and trusted) longtime servant for the Monteils who is also a virulently xenophobic nationalist. He plots with the village’s sexton to foment another French revolution, expelling the “wops, kikes” and unionists. Joseph hates priests, but likes religion – as the sexton says, “The clergy will help get rid of the Jews.” (Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière transplanted the late-19^th century story to the 1930s, and knowing what we know now about Europe in the ’30s, this is especially chilling.) The Monteils, of course, are oblivious to this, even as the Madame chides Celestine for wearing perfume while working.

Celestine dutifully works through the insults, the flirtations and even Joseph’s fascism, but when Monsieur Rebour unexpectedly passes away in his bed, clutching the boots that Celestine wears for him, she decides there’s no reason to stay on any longer, and proffers her resignation. But, at the train station before departure, she learns that Claire, a young neighboring farmgirl whom Celestine is fond of, has been accosted and murdered. Celestine suddenly returns to the estate and resumes her work.

Our initial inclination is to assume she wants to take revenge on Joseph, whom, she believes, is the obvious suspect, but she obviously finds him primitively attractive as well – he’s more reluctant to sleep with her than she with him. She ingratiates herself with him, starts doing chores for him, and fosters familiarity, even with Joseph knowing that she has “bad ideas” about him. But the Captain, next door, starts going sour on his longtime servant and lover, Rose (Gilberte Géniat), and Celestine is receptive to his fresh advances as well. As her relationship deepens with Joseph, she agrees to marry him and move with him to Cherbourg, where he’ll open an inn for other like-minded political activists; “Plus, it’s a military town… You’ll have every garrison at your feet.”

Jeanne Moreau and Georges Géret in ‘Diary Of A Chambermaid.’

Renoir’s version clearly vilifies Joseph, sends him to doom, and Celestine ends up with the Captain, who is a friendly, flower-eating eccentric – still, though, an admirable match for her, all considered. But Buñuel’s Celestine carries a pronounced streak of amoral opportunism – she’s clearly working every available option, and her own self-interest is just as important as any moral mission she may presume. By the time she sees to it that Joseph is arrested for the murder, the case she’s made is too weak, and he’s quickly released. The Captain here, in Buñuel’s version, is friendly enough, but can also be a bully and a liar; Celestine has already married him when she learns of Joseph’s release. The Captain admits he has always admired Joseph, and is becoming friends with Monteil. Our last glimpse of Celestine is the look on her face when it dawns on her that she’s just married into everything she should be hating.

The film concludes with Joseph standing in the doorway of his Cherbourg tavern, another woman already on his arm, cheering on the nationalist political parade passing by. And, in a darkly brilliant coup-du-théatre, he leads the marchers in a cry of “Vive Chiappe! Vive Chiappe!” Chiappe was the Parisian prefect-of-police who saw to it that Buñuel’s 1930 L’Age D’Or was banned in France.

The Diary Of A Chambermaid was Buñuel’s first collaboration with the French producer Serge Silberman and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, and, save for the Silvia Pinal – Gustavo Alatriste Simon Of The Desert the very next year, most of Buñuel’s work hereafter included one or both of them. It started out a little rocky – Buñuel wanted to shoot in Mexico with Silvia Pinal as Celestine, but Silberman wanted a French film, and arranged for Louis Malle to introduce Buñuel to Jeanne Moreau. She is, of course, perfect.

The Luis Buñuel Project – The Exterminating Angel

Viridiana, by its creators’ general consensus, had been a very successful film, despite having been banned in Spain, where Buñuel had shot it. General Franco, honestly, hadn’t found it all that incendiary, but the powerful Spanish clergy, following the Vatican’s lead, were infuriated, and convinced Franco to forbid its presentation in Spain. It wasn’t until 1977 that Spaniards were allowed to exhibit the film.

Buñuel had made the acquaintance of Gustavo Alatriste a few years earlier in Mexico, and when the successful and wealthy Alatriste decided to invest in filmmaking (no doubt at the gentle urging of his wife, the actress Silvia Pinal), Buñuel was amenable to having Alatriste produce both Viridiana and his next film, which started out as The Castaways Of Providence Street, but was, upon script completion, titled The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador) (Mexico, 1962). The castaways part was a reference to Gericault’s famous painting of The Raft Of The Medusa, but another writer friend of Buñuel’s had used The Exterminating Angel (a reference to Abaddon (in Hebrew), or Exterminus (in Latin) who was the King of the Locusts in Revelations, and the first harbinger of the destruction of the Earth’s population after the 144,000 are saved) as a title for a play he’d never finished. Buñuel appropriated the title with the writer’s blessing, and the rest is film history.

Blanca, Dr. Conte, Colonel Alvaro, Julio and Lucia de Nobilé – “The Exterminating Angel.” credit: cinephilefix.wordpress.com

The story rests on a simple idea; having gathered at a wealthy couple’s stately home for an after-the-opera dinner, the hosts, their maître d’ and their guests, (19 people, altogether) find they cannot leave the music room they’d all gathered in after the meal. There are no physical barriers or supernatural force fields; they simply lose the will to proceed when they reach the wide open doorway that leads to the next room, individually and collectively. They settle in to the various chairs and sofas, find spots on the floor to stretch out, and spend the night, assuming they’ll just leave in the morning. But, much to the consternation of their hosts, they don’t. Or can’t. And nights turn to weeks, as a crowd gathers outside the house, cognizant of the fact that its inhabitants are trapped inside. But the people outside are no more able to enter the home’s entry gate than those inside are to walk out.

The situation lends itself to symbolic speculation, but Buñuel insists that the reasons for their imprisonment, their ‘shipwrecked’ state, are unimportant; it’s a surrealist device. What’s important to Buñuel is how these people function within that situation. The crisply-tuxedoed, stylishly coiffed-and-gowned haute bourgeoisie are generally stiff and pretentious at the start of the evening’s gathering, and Buñuel has some surrealist fun at their expense. The kitchen staff, inexplicably, already knows to start sneaking their way out of the house just before the guests arrive. Two of the male guests meet three times in fairly quick succession – the first is a warm introduction by a third, the second is them recognizing each other as old friends, and the third is an introduction by a third where they regard each other coldly, warily. The entrance of the guests themselves into the palatial house happens twice, while two escaping kitchen workers wait through both entrances in real time before leaving. The evening’s host, Edmundo Nobilé (Enrique Rambal) makes the same toast to the opera’s prima donna twice. When the first course is presented on a large silver salver, the waiter trips on his own feet and falls flat on his face, sending the food flying everywhere. The guests howl with laughter and derision, and assume it’s a prank-on-purpose. We think we’re sharing the hostess’ mortification (she’s Lucia de Nobilé [Lucy Gallardo]) as she marches to the kitchen. But, out of the guests earshot, she informs the maître d’, Julio (Claudio Brook) that one of her guests, the taciturn Mr. Russel, wasn’t amused, and that he should therefore cancel the planned entrance of a small bear and three goats that she had also arranged as a surprise. After dinner, they all retire to the music room, save for Leticia, “the Valkyrie” (Silvia Pinal), whom, as a lark or an omen, throws one of the dessert ramekins through the dining room window. “Some Jew passing by,” quips Leandro.

Up until now, everyone had been on their best behavior. After Blanca’s piano performance of a short sonata, their praise is effusive, even if a few of the comments (“Pity there was no harpsichord,” “Please play some Scarlatti next”) seem damning with faint praise. It’s here that the aforementioned third not-so-friendly introduction, between Cristián Ugalde and Leandro Gomez occurs – yet another hint of unpleasantness to come. Cristián’s wife, Rita (Patricia Morán) is discussing her pregnancy with Lucia and another guest – “This is the fourth, isn’t it?” Cristián is asked. “Actually, I’ve lost track, ma’am,” he deadpans. Lucia arranges to meet her secret lover, the retired-hero-Colonel Alvaro (César del Campo) in the bedroom, unconcerned that Edmundo might interrupt them. Edmundo and Lucia, as the hosts, are somewhat put-off that their guests (Lucia’s lover among them) are slowly turning the music room into a campsite, but Edmundo, the ever-gracious host, indulges it amiably.

Edmundo Nobilé and Leticia, “The Valkyrie” – The Exterminating Angel.” credit: filmlinc.com

When everyone wakes in the morning, Lucia has Julio serve dinner leftovers for breakfast, and coffee. Julio, unlike the others, has been going back and forth between rooms performing his duties, but upon serving the breakfast spread, he finds he can’t leave the room, either; he and Blanca, the pianist, slump onto chairs just inside the doorway, struck with a mysterious despair.

One of the projects Buñuel was considering before Viridiana was an adaptation of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies. The Raft Of The Medusa is an obvious touchstone here; Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (Huis Clos) is also cited as an influence. “Hell is other people (L’enfer, c’est les autres)” is a sentiment Buñuel might pass along here as well, but without Golding’s or Sartre’s earnest humorlessness. Civility disintegrates quickly and consistently as the days, then weeks, go by. A guest likens their predicament to a train crash she survived, whereupon a third-class car was crushed: “I think the lower classes are less sensitive to pain,” says Rita, in sympathy to her friend. When the bullying Raul (Tito Junco) accuses Edmundo of trapping them there deliberately, Leticia slaps him derisively. Days before, a young man decided the water in the plant vases was too funky – now the other guests note that the same young man drinks from them anyway. A small closet full of ceramic vases becomes the communal latrine, yet the women emerging from it have visions of mountain landscapes, flowing rivers and eagles passing overhead.

‘The Exterminating Angel” credit – criterion.com

In the following days, the men take an antique axe and dig into the interior wall, exposing a water pipe for all of them to use; of course, letting the women drink first sets off another near-brawl amongst the men who aren’t interested in waiting. Mr. Russel’s heart gives out and he dies; the body is shuttled into another closet. Julio, at this point, offers to share the plateful of crumpled paper bits he’s eating. Doctor Carlos Conde’s patient, Leonora (Augusto Benedico and Bertha Moss, respectively), implores him to join her on a pilgrimage to Lourdes after they escape their ordeal in this house. “When we get to Lourdes, I want you to buy me one of those washable plastic Virgins. You will, won’t you?” A young, ardently devoted couple, who have missed their own wedding, commits suicide in one of the other closets, to the apparent dark amusement of many of the guests upon discovery, which seems a little inappropriate until it dawns on us, the viewers, that we’ve been having the same darkly amused sense of schadenfreude towards the whole situation that  Buñuel has been regaling us with. And just when you think things might not be all that funny anymore, the bear and the goats get loose inside the house – when the goats enter the music room, it quickly becomes a barbecue pit (with furniture, paintings and musical instruments feeding he fire) while the bear shambles happily through the rest of the house.

“The Exterminating Angel” – credit: criterion.com

The movie is tricky; obviously Buñuel is sending up the social constructs of his ‘castaways,’ and how their manners, rituals, co-dependence, condescension and prejudices entrap them, but there’s much more going on than simple symbols or allegories. There isn’t a reason in the world why any one of them can’t walk through that doorway, and yet none will, even for their own self-preservation. Nor will the friends, families and returning kitchen employees of those trapped within set foot on the grounds to discover what’s happening and/or lead them out. When they do finally figure out how to leave (a strategy that seems just as surreal as their reasons for staying in the first place), they all go home, clean up, and head for church (of course) to attend a mass that the Nobilés have arranged as a Te Deum (thanks for a specific blessing). When the Mass ends, the priests exit the chapel…except… they stop at the doorway. Looking behind them, the congregants, as well, show little impulse or interest in walking outside. And as the film ends, a flock of twenty or thirty sheep make their way to the church’s entrance…

On the whole, Buñuel was content with the film – Alatriste left him alone to make the film he wanted to make, a luxury that his previous producers, even Oscar Dancigers, had rarely afforded him. It was also his most forthrightly surrealist film since L’Age D’Or, 32 years earlier. Buñuel, though, like most serious artists, claimed he could only see mistakes and missed opportunities – he would have preferred to have shot the film in Europe, either London or Paris (the Mexican film industry was at a pretty low ebb in the early 60s), and Alatriste had been a little stingier with this budget than he’d been with Viridiana. But I suspect Buñuel couldn’t have helped but smile when Alatriste, watching the finished film, concluded, “I don’t understand a thing in it. It’s marvelous!”

In the BFI / Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, The Exterminating Angel is 202^nd with critics, 132^nd with directors (a tie with Belle Du Jour). Buñuel is perennially in the conversation when people discuss their favorite films of all time, and The Exterminating Angel is always near the top of those conversations about Buñuel. He would make one more interesting film with Gustavo Alatriste and Silvia Pinal in Mexico, Simon Of The Desert in 1965, but next up on the Project is Diary Of A Chambermaid, more progress in Buñuel’s goal to return to exclusively European filmmaking.

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Viridiana

While Nazarin and The Young One were by no means financial successes, Luis Buñuel and his producers were very pleased with them, and, confident of consistent financial backing, he forged on to develop a number of subsequent film projects to build on the American connections he’d made with the latter film – potential adaptions of more Benito Pérez Galdos novels, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, Matthew Lewis’s 19^th-century gothic novel The Monk, and works by Carlos Fuentes and Julio Cortazar. But an unexpected thing came up; as part of Francisco Franco’s ‘modernization’ efforts in the late fifties and early sixties, Buñuel was invited to return to the Spain he had fled in the thirties to make new films. Despite a hue and cry from many of his virulently anti-fascist Spanish refugee friends, he indeed returned to his homeland. But the film he made was no capitulation – in fact, it reinvigorated many of the same controversies that his 1930s surrealist work had evoked. A cartoon of the day depicted a jovial Buñuel delivering the reels of his new film to a welcoming Generalissimo; the last panel shows the film exploding in Franco’s face.

Viridiana (Spain, 1962), like Nazarin, is yet another character study of a person of strong religious and moral convictions who has those foundations subverted by the earthbound realities of cold commerce and human nature. It’s often cited as an adaptation of Benito Pérez Galdos’ Halma, but, while it shares an incident or two from that novel, the story is completely fictionalized by Buñuel, drawing on his interest in Saint Verdiana, an Italian saint known for her early self-sacrificing charity and, later, her stark seclusion as an anchorite in a small cell in Castelfiorentino for 34 years. He also included an obsession or two of his own (a dream/fantasy of sleeping with the drugged Queen of Spain), a reference or two to DeSade, his usual injections of good-humored fetishism, and his affinity for the salt-of-the-earth types that populated a number of his Mexican films.

Silvia Pinal in ‘Viridiana.’ credit: bfi.org.uk

Viridiana (a radiant Silvia Pinal) is a young nun about to take her sisterhood vows when the Mother Superior tells her that her distant Uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), her last living relative, is unable to attend the ceremony, and requests that she visit him for a few days beforehand.  Viridiana barely knows the man, but Mother Superior reveals that he’s subsidized her education, and is an earnest supporter of their work. Reluctantly, Viridiana acquiesces to the Mother Superior’s insistence. Arriving at Don Jaime’s estate, she finds him to be a pensive and saddened man who has never moved on from the death of his wife (Viridiana’s mother’s sister), and has allowed the spacious farmlands to lie fallow for over twenty years; nonetheless, he’s happy about her arrival and visit, and she quickly ingratiates herself with the other workers in the house and on the estate. But Viridiana’s been cloistered for years, and many aspects of the casual earthiness of the estate challenge her sense of chaste propriety. She learns that Don Jaime has an illegitimate son, about her age, and that his obsession with his wife’s death is far more perverse than she could imagine. Assisted by his devoted housekeeper Ramona (Margarita Lozano), Don Jaime drugs Viridiana in an attempt to violate her and prevent her from returning to the monastery; her resemblance to his late wife has addled his heart (and libido). He relents at the last minute, but tells her the next day that it is, indeed, what he did. Furious and humiliated, Viridiana packs and departs, but the police stop her from boarding the train, and reveal to her that a tragedy has just occurred. She returns to the estate to find that Don Jaime has taken his own life.

Fernando Rey and Silvia Pinal in ‘Viridiana.’ credit: filmlinc.com

The estate and grounds are left to his only heirs – Viridiana and the illegitimate son, Jorge (the reliable Francisco Rabal, last seen in Nazarin). Jorge is an urban playboy who has been working in architecture, and has brought along his current girlfriend, Lucia. But Lucia is quickly bored with Jorge’s determined efforts to modernize the house and restore the farm, and Jorge swiftly takes up with the starry-eyed Ramona. Viridiana, meanwhile, has chosen not to return to the convent, and turns her wing of the estate into a refuge for the local indigents. She doesn’t directly blame herself, but whatever inner demons compelled Don Jaime to his depravity and suicide certainly weren’t deterred by her inner purity and devotion – she feels unworthy to return to the sisterhood, and devotes herself to helping the gnarliest of the village’s social detritus. Things start out well – the group is grateful to her, even if they think she’s a little crazy – but things disintegrate quickly when Viridiana and Jorge travel to town to confer with their lawyers. The band of beggars take over the grand house’s dining room, enjoy a spectacularly reckless dinner, and, to the strains of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ enact their own squalid tableau of DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper.’ Jorge and Viridiana return to the impressive wreckage only to be accosted by their guests, with Viridiana once again having her chastity forcibly threatened.

‘Viridiana.’ credit: filmoteca.cat

Needless to say, Franco was unimpressed with Buñuel’s darkly comic and deeply disturbing (even today, fifty years later, I promise) tale of pious innocence corrupted by harsh secular reality, and the film was condemned by both the Spanish government and the Vatican. Small wonder it won that year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Buñuel’s flat-out masterpiece is a miraculously balanced film – he had a pretty serious budget to work with, and his work with prolific Spanish cinematographer José F. Aguayo is gorgeous throughout. Buñuel’s enlightened humanism ennobles practically every shot of the film, despite how the scenario almost relentlessly stacks the deck against his beautiful protagonist. It’s pretty clear that Mother Superior orders Viridiana to Don Jaime’s company as a concession to his material generosity to the convent, and, after Don Jaime’s death, she’s visibly relieved that Viridiana has chosen not to return there, quickly washing her hands of the whole incident. Don Jaime is a veritable catalogue of fetishes, doting lasciviously on Ramona’s young jump-roping daughter,  discreetly but ardently trying on elements of his late wife’s wedding garments, and passive-aggressively enlisting Ramona in his impulsive plan to shame Viridiana into staying. When Viridiana collects her impromptu family of beggars, lepers, loose women and criminals, she clearly hasn’t the slightest notion of what she’s getting herself into. Even the final scene, with Jorge inviting the shell-shocked Viridiana to share a game of cards with he and Ramona, carries a sly carnal undercurrent. As in Nazarin, Buñuel can’t help but like even his most grotesque creations; for all of his dark eccentricities, Don Jaime is ultimately a very charming and sympathetic man, and Viridiana’s beggarly charges are ribaldly entertaining practically to the last. We can tsk and shake our heads (occasionally laughing despite ourselves) at the extremities of this squalid lot, but who’s to say that any one of them would have been unwelcome at Jesus’ own last supper? Viridiana’s good intentions are cruelly unrewarded, but we still have deep respect for them, and her, throughout the film, as does Buñuel.

Movies – The Luis Buñuel Project – Nazarin and The Young One

In Nazarin (Mexico, 1959), Luis Buñuel would seem to be making the first of a series of black comedies concerning what would become a favorite target – Christianity. We’ve had hints and short episodes of this in many of his earlier films – the overtly surrealist L’Age D’Or took a number of Marquis de Sade-inspired swipes at the church, Susana’s reformatory escape seemed divinely arranged, and religious hypocrisy was one of the foundations of Francisco’s sterling reputation in El – This Strange Passion. Here our protagonist is Father Nazario (prolific Spanish actor Francisco Rabal), who leads a devout life of humility and anti-materialism. He has impoverished himself, living in a hostel teeming with poor laborers, grifters, and four particularly seedy streetwalkers. What few possessions he acquires are usually stolen from him shortly after, and he depends on the charity of others for his food – namely, his hard-boiled landlady Mrs. Chanfa (Ofelia Guilmáin) and her sullen helper Beatriz (Marga López). Beatriz would seem a perfect subject for Nazario’s spiritual ministrations – abandoned by her sneering boyfriend Pinto (Noé Murayama), she’s horribly depressed until she meets Nazario, who is unaware of Beatriz’ self-destructive nymphomania (illustrated in a fairly disturbing wish-fulfillment fantasy episode). Subsequently, Andara, one of the streetwalkers (Rita Macedo from …Archibaldo de la Cruz), is involved in a bloody and lethal quarrel with a rival prostitute, and hides from the police in Nazario’s room. The non-judgmental priest tends to her wounds while scolding her for her indiscretions, but it isn’t too long before the addled-but-still-manipulative Andara has Nazario fetching tequila for her. One of the prostitutes gets wind that Andara is holed up with Nazario, and Beatriz helps Andara to flee before the police arrive, but not before Andara sets fire to Nazario’s room as a distraction for the authorities. Accused of vile intimacies with the fugitive Andara, and alleged to be responsible for the fire that destroyed the entire hostel, Nazario will passively submit to the judgment of the authorities. But his fellow priest, Don Ángel (Edmundo Barbero) wants Nazario to spare himself (and the church) the humiliation that would follow, and Nazario decides to wander the countryside instead as a simple pilgrim.

Francisco Rabal in ‘Nazarin.’
credit: bnowalk.blogspot.com

Buñuel has no problem with the basics of Nazario’s beliefs. What he’s holding up is Nazario’s absolutism, and his willful disengagement from the culture that he’s part of, for better or worse. After Beatriz tries to convince Nazario that he has healed her sick niece (when the medicine the girl had taken the night before simply kicked in), Andara and Beatriz follow him into the ‘wilderness,’ seemingly enthusiastic acolytes. But in reality, Andara is simply another fugitive hanging on Nazario’s coattails, and Beatriz has channeled her own sexual torments into faux religious fervor. Nazario’s insistence on setting a Christian example as passively as possible becomes a kind of arrogance, and dark humor emerges from the missed opportunities, and disasters, that Nazario, unwittingly, leaves in his wake. Encountering a small construction crew, Nazario offers to work for food. But the other wage-earning workers dissuade him – his presence devalues their own jobs. As Nazarin walks away, we here a violent quarrel between the boss and his workers, and gunshots. Oh, well…  The three travelers happen upon a small village racked with plague – everyone is dead or dying except for the clergy, who emerge from the chapel in full regalia – and Nazario counsels a dying woman to release herself from earthly concerns and think of heaven’s glory. Her response? “Juan…! Juan…!” Heaven can’t hope to compete with the glories of her boyfriend, and, when he actually shows up, they show our three pilgrims the door.  Happening across a large, well-to-do family happily alighting from a horse-drawn carriage in a small village, Nazario shakes his head sadly – “There is nothing for us to do here.”  Since they’re leading comfortable lives, Nazario sees them as irretrievable and/or unworthy.

Marga López in ‘Nazarin.’
credit: http://www.notrecinema.com

Things come to a head in another rural village, when Andara becomes the love object of a browbeaten dwarf named Ujo, and Beatriz discovers that her former lover, Pinto, is here, buying horses. Pinto feeds the authorities stories of Nazario and Andara’s ‘perversions,’ and they’re arrested, while Pinto essentially kidnaps Beatriz as his sex slave (with her own mother’s help!). The local bishop has no problem with Nazario being hung – he just doesn’t want him perp-walking to the gallows with the other criminals (including Andara) in public. Like Don Ángel, the bishop has no conception of humanity’s true need for potential salvation outside his own absolutist beliefs and the preservation and promotion of the institution of the Church.

‘Nazarin.’
credit: thepinksmoke.com

Much of what Buñuel had learned by cranking out these Mexican dramas is on admirable display here. The film is yet another adaptation of someone else’s novel (Benito Pérez Galdós, who later wrote the book that Buñuel’s Tristana was based on as well), but the adaptation is thoroughly infused with Buñuel’s seamless visual narrative, scrupulous character detail and excoriating black humor. It’s almost hard to imagine this story being expressed by any other medium besides film, by any other author than Buñuel. The sympathy Buñuel expresses for Nazario, while simultaneously using him as the example of everything that’s wrong with everything he believes, is an astonishing balancing act, convincingly executed by the talented Rabal. And the varieties of behavior he elicits from Marga López and Rita Macedo are just as impressive – from earnest devotion to cackling psychosis, from realist intimacy to surrealist excess, they are the schizophrenic Magdalenes that unwittingly compel Nazario to pay any attention at all to the people around him, the appreciative permanent audience that Nazario thinks he’s refusing to play to. As mentioned before, Buñuel is fine with, or at least ambivalent about, the general moral and ethical myths and structures of Christianity. What makes religion malevolent, in his eyes, and in this masterful film, are the uses to which we sinners put it to.

Buñuel’s confidence in adapting literary properties to his own creative uses is also well-displayed in The Young One (La Joven) (Mexico, 1960), shot in Mexico with an American cast, in English. In this case, his collaborators are as interesting as the auteur; Buñuel’s credited co-writer is H.B. Addis, whom in reality was blacklisted American screenwriter Hugo Butler, who had moved to Mexico in 1951, and had previously collaborated with Buñuel on 1954’s Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe. The producer is credited as George P. Werker, but, again, this was a pseudonym for George Pepper, who had been an effective liberal activist until 1951, when Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee named him as a communist, and Pepper fled to Mexico rather than testify in what he knew would be a lose/lose forum. It was Pepper who had discovered Travelin’ Man, a provocative short story by Peter Matthiessen chronicling a fateful meeting between a black man, wrongfully accused of a crime he didn’t commit and an old-school white southern game warden, on an isolated island off the coast of Georgia. Pepper, Butler and Buñuel all admired the story, but took many constructive liberties to fashion a story of their own that enhanced and expanded Matthiessen’s, and Buñuel’s, central concerns.

Hap Miller (Zachary Scott) has been the game warden on this small island for quite a few years, assisted by Pee-Wee, an alcoholic handyman who, as the film starts, has just passed away, leaving a granddaughter, Evvie (Key Meersman), who had joined them a few years previously when her mother died. Now Miller is solely responsible for Evvie; at first, he wants to hand her over to the mainland church, and have them find a proper home for the young orphan. But Evvie, maturing, is also becoming a young woman, and Miller can’t help but consider keeping her around as a different kind of companion, despite the age difference and her reluctance to engage Miller intimately. The local boatman, Jackson (Crahan Denton), comes out on his regularly scheduled stop, and tells Miller that the local council has approved construction of a hunter’s clubhouse on the island, insuring that Miller will be set for quite a while under notably improved circumstances.

Key Meersman in ‘The Young One.’
credit: slantmagazine.com

But another ‘visitor’ has crossed over to Miller’s little fiefdom as well; this is Traver (Bernie Hamilton), a black jazz musician who resisted the attempts of one of the city women to seduce him, and whom subsequently cried “Rape!” against him in spiteful revenge. Fleeing the town in a small motorboat to avoid the impromptu necktie party, he lands on Miller’s island hoping to find food for himself and fuel for his boat. Miller has gone to the mainland to discuss the clubhouse and inquire to the church about Evvie, and in his absence Traver happens across Evvie. After a cautious initial confrontation, Evvie gives Traver some food and gas, and Traver avails himself of one of Miller’s shotguns as well, leaving Evvie with twenty dollars – he may be a fugitive, but he’s an honest one.

Miller returns the next day, and learns of Traver’s visit with Evvie. Furious that this colored fella would take so many insolent liberties (the “n” word is ubiquitous in the film), Miller charges off, rifle in hand, to protect what’s his and teach the intruder a lethal lesson. He blows holes in Traver’s small boat, and eventually fires at Traver himself. Thinking the man dead, Miller discovers Evvie kept the twenty dollars for herself, and Hap assumes it was payment for sexual favors. But the not-dead-yet Traver storms the cabin, holds Miller at bay while he picks up tools to repair the boat, and confirms Evvie’s story that the twenty dollars was honest payment for the things he needed. After leaving peacefully, Miller makes up with Evvie, and, to ingratiate himself further with her, pays a visit to Traver, who is repairing his boat on the beach. Still asserting his cultural superiority, Miller nonetheless learns that Traver shares his military experience – they both fought in Italy, nearly together. Miller eventually agrees to put Traver up while his boat’s patches cure, and recruits him to do a little work around the compound for the bed and food. Miller lets Traver stay in the separate cottage that Evvie’s been staying in, and takes Evvie into his own house for the night. Convinced that he’s back on Evvie’s good side, he finally has his way with the girl that night.

Bernie Hamilton and Key Meersman in ‘The Young One.’
credit: http://www.filmforno.com

It’s pretty obvious to Traver what has happened, but he keeps his head down about it. Miller must now walk a fine line between his enmity for Traver, who is forthright about the inequalities that he must tolerate from people just like Miller, and parading his generosity towards Traver for Evvie’s sake. In a rainstorm that has stranded Traver at the compound for another night, Jackson appears – he has brought Reverend Fleetwood (Claudio Brook) to inquire about Evvie. Fleetwood’s arranged a place for her to stay in town, through the ladies’ auxiliary at the church. But Miller is no longer interested in giving Evvie up. Miller also learns from Jackson that Traver is a fugitive for the alleged rape of the socialite; Miller and Jackson, blitheringly ‘lawful’ as ever, go after Traver again, guns in hand, but he went into hiding  when the boat showed up.

The next morning, after a fruitless night of ‘hunting,’ they resume the chase while the Reverend takes Evvie to one of the island lagoons to baptize her. Despite Evvie’s flustered surprise at what ‘baptism’ entails, she and the Reverend get along well, and, on the way back, it is they who happen upon Traver first. He’s been injured by an animal trap, and Evvie and the Reverend bring him back to Miller’s cottage to fix up his nasty wound. The Reverend expects to bring Traver back to the mainland to face the charges, believing Traver to be innocent, and hopeful that he’ll be acquitted. But Miller, and the virulently racist Jackson, may have other ideas.

Key Meersman and Zachary Scott in ‘The Young One.’
credit: cinesthesiac.blogspot.com

Buñuel’s concluding episodes of this expertly constructed crucible of southern class issues, racial tension, sordid sexuality and unlikely deliverance doesn’t have much in common with where Matthiessen took things originally. The original story exclusively concerned Traver and Miller. But our three collaborators spread the story out admirably, and created on of the most forthrightly disturbing and affecting films of the time. Vagaries of distribution, promotion, and marketing doomed the film to near-obscurity until Milestone Films released a new print of the film in 1993, and thoughtful reassessments by film critics and historians (most notably Chicago’s Jonathan Rosenbaum and Randall Conrad, writing in Cineaste) unearthed what may be one of Buñuel’s honest masterpieces, despite being a stylistic outlier from Buñuel’s other work. (Buñuel was obviously aware of this as well, but he couldn’t resist adding  a quick moment of Evvie enthusiastically stepping on a large spider, recalling Gaston Modot hilariously doing the same in L’Age D’Or.) The script is superb, refusing to soften its more troubling subjects – Traver doesn’t deserve the fate he’s resisting in the film, yet we understand how commonplace circumstances like this were; describing them this baldly in 1960 might have been a marketing dealbreaker, and the film today is still considered by some to be an exploitative potboiler not unlike John Ford’s Tobacco Road or Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney. Evvie’s deflowering is equally repellent, and yet we never come to see Miller as a villain – Zachary Scott’s performance, loud, flinty and indignant, is nonetheless filled with small details and choices that keep him genuinely human, genuinely sympathetic. Key Meersman’s performance is flat and functional – she’s obviously not a talented actress, God bless ‘er, and her lack of craft reportedly drove Buñuel crazy – but the tone she imposes on the film, inadvertently or not, is perfect nonetheless, and she’s well supported by her co-stars. She’s the resilient center for the provocations that Buñuel surrounds her with. Evvie is an exploited innocent, yet we never see her as a victim, and there’s a reason she’s the subject of the title of the film. The great Gabriel Figueroa is once again the cinematographer, and his collaboration with Buñuel is seamless. The hundreds of set-ups in the compound’s courtyard flow smoothly scene-by-scene, and Buñuel’s compositions impart valuable information unobtrusively – watch how often in the interiors Figueroa shoots at Evvie’s eye level rather than straight-on. Bernie Hamilton makes terrific work of Buñuel and Butler’s conception of Traver – admirable, but not unrealistically noble; a hipster, but not an outsider; and, essentially, the understated moral center of the film. Buñuel makes sly use of Traver’s discomfort whenever Evvie refers to his clarinet as his ‘licorice stick.’ (Hamilton is probably best known for having gone on to portraying Captain Dobey on Starsky and Hutch, and for being the brother of jazz great Chico Hamilton.) And finally there is Buñuel’s uncharacteristically charitable introduction of Reverend Fleetwood. Buñuel usually treats such figures with harshly comic derision, but in Fleetwood he presents an admirably committed spiritual figure who never places himself above the people around him, nor outside the culture he’s a part of. Actor Claudio Brook would go on to appear in a number of Buñuel’s later films.

Despite its resurrection in the early nineties, this is a very hard film to see, existing on VHS and DVD only as out-of-print rarities, and it’s rarely screened in revival these days. That’s a shame – this film is every bit as good as standards like To Kill A Mockingbird or In The Heat Of The Night. This film was a real discovery for me; it’s quite brilliant, and I encourage you to seek it out in whatever form you can find it in.

*Providentially, the entire film is available on YouTube!

*Much of what I learned about The Young One comes from Randall Conrad’s superb Cineaste article from 1993. It’s a fascinating essay, and can be found here.