#22 "The Milky Way" a la Luis Bunuel

That's the English title of Bunuel's La Voie Lactee' (1969), my favorite of all his films. Our little excursion last time into the surreal world of cosmology and the fate of our titular galaxy reminded me of the film, only one of a surreal corpus that most often deals with cultural apocalypse, but always with cosmic overtones. And the ones I'll recommend are, moreover, shamefully funny.

His very last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977--I'll use the English titles hereafter) had just played on one of those 300+ movie channels, and I had just become infested with several strains of flu-virus--one of which could have been swinish, since I often bought fruit from a Mexican market around the corner--and, accompanied by multiple-orificed catarrh, laid me up and down for about six weeks. Bunuel kept me company, along with reruns of Scrubs--that highly entertaining TV sitcom which has a nice Bunuelian mix of fantasy and reality for comic effect. Obscure, which I hadn't seen, was disappointing ... not good medicine. So, with a little help from Netflix, I tested my very positive recollections of the auteur-director's earlier work that I had seen, along with some others, to see how they all matched up.

But first, if you're unfamiliar with Bunuel, or have seen only the Academy Award winner The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972--Best Foreign Film), think Coen Brothers. While as far as I know they haven't publicly acknowledged any influence--as have David Lynch and Kubrick--their Raising Arizona, Lebowski, Oh Brother, and especially Barton Fink could have been made by Bunuel. I'm convinced, for instance, that most of the utterly surreal last half of Fink--from and including the murdered woman the hero finds next to him in bed--is a warped dream-vision of a guy with writer's block ... or maybe not. The Coens' movies rely above all on almost total unpredictability--unexpected flashback and forward, startling occurrences and disturbing imagery, fantastic dream-sequences that may or may not be dream-sequences, grotesque characters, inexplicable cut-aways, and crazy plot-lines that become, more often than not, befuddlingly lost to the audience altogether in the course of the movie. Great fun.

And that's also Bunuel at his best. What sets him apart, though, is his abiding social conscience. Informing all the outrageous funny-business is SATIRE. Main target: the hypocrisy of the middle-class. And secondarily that mask of justification for bourgeois lust and greed: ORGANIZED RELIGION. In Bunuel's case, given his own background and the backdrop of his movies, that means Roman Catholicism. Sect doesn't really matter--any dogmatic creed would have served his purposes (likewise, Bergman naturally chose high-church Lutheranism). How effective was his social satire?--at the end of his Spanish period he was lucky to escape the Fascist/Catholic-dominated country of Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who's still dead, by the way) with his life. Repatriation to Mexico didn't keep him out of trouble, but it did eventually lead to some of his greatest films. (more)
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