How could Bunuel NOT be the founder and chief practitioner of surreal cinema, considering his earliest credential: An Andalusian Dog (1929)? It was co-directed by Salvador Dali, of all people, and they both have roles in the film. A curiosity of film-making in it's infancy, it's nonetheless revolutionary in its imagery--Freudian symbolism to the core. No discernible plot (a murder is there somewhere), but rather it assails us with a series of nightmarish scenes invoking the flow of the unconscious. Ants are crawling, death's-head moths are perching, and sea-urchins are urching about in all the wrong places. At one point, and for no discernible narrative purpose, the distracted "husband" of the film hitches himself to a heretofore-unseen grand piano with two rotting donkeys inside, attached to which in turn are two trussed-up and bewildered priests dragged along behind. Cut. A blind detective appears fitfully to seemingly piece things together. Impossible. That gives you a gist--and I didn't even mention the (most) notorious image of a woman's eyeball being slit open to the tune of a cloud passing over the full moon. Don't rent this one. Rather, re-watch with pleasure Hitchcock's thriller, Spellbound, where G. Peck and Dr. I. Bergman try to make more sense out of Salvador Dali's dream-sequence imagery. Yes, he collaborated.And speaking of Hitchcock, also avoid Bunuel's two films with leading-lady Catherine Deneuve: Belle du Jour (1967) and Tristana (1970). Though Bunuel was not quite as obsessed as the American director with icy-blond heroines, the auteur's choice of Deneuve pretty much ruins these movies, as Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren almost did for Hitchcock's post-Grace-Kelly efforts. (Sorry ... love Hitch, but never quite Birds and Vertigo.) Award-winning but a bit overrated in my view, Bunuel's films with Deneuve about repressed sexuality in hypocritical bourgeois society might have been okay but for her terminally repressed acting style. Showing us, as the old Hollywood saw goes, a range of emotions from A to B. Then again, it might have been the scripts. Too earnest in the satire, without enough comic grotesquery.
Herewith, then, are my six must-see films of Luis Bunuel, without undue critical baggage--he was one of the great critic-haters, by the way, because of the cretinous reception often given his more "serious" (i.e. non-commercial) films--in chronological order:
- An Andalusian Dog (1929). Okay, so I take back my earlier comment. Everybody should spend just 16 entertaining/excruciating minutes with this infamous and influential almost-movie but once in their lives. Compare: David Lynch's Eraserhead.
- The Exterminating Angel (1962). Upper-class guests arrive twice at dinner party. Servants inexplicably leave. Guests discover they can't, though there are no physical barriers preventing them. Hilarity ensues. Spend several days (or weeks?) trying to figure out their pseudo-problem, eating leftovers and starving to death and dying of disease. Meanwhile, a pet bear and some sheep escape from hostess' bedroom. Sheep killed, grilled, and eaten. Idea to sacrifice host to alleviate situation. Commits suicide instead. Finally figure out they can leave after all. Survivors attend funeral mass in nearby church, additional real-live sheep following them in. We hear gunshots in background as police shoot down working-class rioters who had been gathering outside the mansion-house throughout the movie. Perhaps surreal is not a strong enough word. Compare: Lord of the Flies (1963).
- Simon of the Desert (1965). Based on 5th-Century Saint Simeon Stylites' supposed son, the pillar-sitter has denied all natural, human desires for 6 years, 6 months, and 6 days. Hilarity ensues. Satan, in the form of the luscious Spanish actress Sylvia Pinal (she was in three by Bunuel, including Angel above), tempts him unmercifully but apparently unsuccessfully in several guises and scenes of fleshly lust. (It's a scant 45 minutes, owing to two other directors dropping out of two other projected "acts" for the film.) Suddenly, in the final scene, we are magically transported to a swinging 60's discotheque, where we find Simon and Sylvia in modern dress, and now somehow a couple, talking and flirting, enjoying their drinks, and watching the carefree patrons dancing to the music of a band called "Radioactive Flesh." Humanity will out. Compare: Monty Pyhon's Life of Brian.
- The Milky Way (1969). Two Beckett/Stoppard-like vagabonds (Peter and John) are on a pilgrimage along the ancient road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, traditionally following the direction of the galactic band in the sky--hence the title. Starting out hitch-hiking on a modern French highway, they step in and out of a panorama of religious history stretching from biblical times to the present. Sometimes they participate in the theological debates and confrontations--trinity or not; free will or predestination; universal salvation or damnation--other times they witness or dream about them. Or the anachronistic scenes are simply intercut without apology.The cast of characters they/we meet includes Jesus getting advice from Mary on whether he would look better without a beard; the Grand Inquisitor digging up a dead saint and burning the body for posthumous heresy; the Pope standing before a firing-squad of anarchists (bizarrely prescient); the Marquis de Sade debating God with his bound concubine. All in good fun. Really ... or sur-really, if you will. At the end of their odyssey, the pilgrim pair resort to, and cavort with, two harlots plying their trade around St. James Cathedral--seeming to fulfill a prophesy, given at the beginning by a God/Death figure, that they will conceive anointed children of some kind. Compare: Coens' Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
- The Discreet Charm Of the Bourgeoisie (1972). As in Angel, Bunuel again employs the conceit of the dinner-party as a key to the facade of conspicuous consumption lived by the middle and upper classes. This time, though, it's in reverse: nobody ever gets to consume. In a comic series of unfulfilled expectations, lunches and dinners are planned, even sat down to, only to be interrupted--and here's the satirical thrust--by complications as mundane as crass forgetfulness to a military coup. We see beneath the specious good life and good manners a panoply of political intrigues, international tensions, financial chicanery, adultery, drug-dealing, murder, and a demented priest. Compare: Robert Altman's Shortcuts.
- The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Bunuel's favorite. Narrative structure turned upside-down into Freudian free-association and determined purely by chance connections between one character or one scene to the next. Most of them comic, some tragi-comic. And then forgotten. His most "existential" film. Randomness rules the universe, but, as a result, we are rewarded with total free-will, or some phantasm thereof. One theme throughout: Humane Morality is all we can count on to withstand the depredations of chance and circumstance. Defies summary, so I won't try. It has to be the most dashingest-of-expectations movie ever made, and yet--in spite of, or because of that--one of the most thoroughly entertaining. Compare: nothing like it.
But in that vein, Myriad Readers, do yourselves a favor and rent/watch Woody Allen's favorite of his own making: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Or re-watch it, as I did the other night. I feel sure that Luis Bunuel would have approvingly watched the Woodman's surreal satire several times over ... had he not died two years earlier.
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