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 – 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