QUICK SELECT
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
L' Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Dir: Luis Bunuel, France, 1972, 102 mins, 35mm, col., Spanish/French with Eng. subtitles (PG)
A small circle of polite society – the Sénéchals, the Thévenots, Florence, the Ambassador and the Bishop – meet at a dinner party. But pleasantries over good wines, gourmet meats and chic décor turn into insult, warfare and hints of cannibalism. It’s initially clothed in the guise of drawing room farce, or even one those 1960s lifestyle films about marital experimentation with self-discovery and boundaries. But Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière are of course having none of that. Taking up from where Exterminating Angel left off at the beginning of the 60s, the characters (including Fernando Rey Michel Piccoli, Bulle Ogier and Delphine Seyrig) are carved up and revealed as tough and unappetising samples of their class. Presented with the support of the French Embassy and the French Ministry of Culture.
L'AGE D'OR & SIMON OF THE DESERT
Both films 35mm, b&w, Eng. subtitles, (PG)
From either end of his long career, two classic featurettes that are amongst Luis Buñuel's most acclaimed films: L’Âge D'or (The Golden Age, 1930, 60 mins) was the final of his collaborations with Salvador Dali and maybe the core film of André Breton’s surrealist movement, with a loose plot about a pair of lovers trying to consummate their passions. But that's merely a distraction from its endless irrationally arranged motifs and sequences. Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto, Mexico, 1965, 42 mins) is a comedy of contrasts between the high idealism of the pole-sitting mystic (based on the fourth-Century Syrian mystic Simeon the Stylite) and the low moral inhibition that passes at his feet. The Devil's also on the prowl — in the comely shape of Silvia Pinal breaking out the arch-surrealist pranks familiar from later and earlier Buñuelian cinema.
NAZARIN
Dir: Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1958, 94', 35mm, b&w., Spanish with Eng. Subtitles. (unclassified 18+)
Father Nazario practises his own brand of liberation theology in a familiar Buñuelian milieu of beggars and prostitutes, venal insight and stupidity. He cheerfully turns the other check and gives away what little he accumulates. This intransigent idealism runs him foul of church and state, forcing him onto the road with his own Martha and Mary — a melancholic ingénue and the bawdy ex-prostitute who got him into trouble in the first place. But his attempts to live the life of Jesus increasingly magnify contradictions of social justice, moral values, and even the point of life over death. Buñuel's second Cannes winner of the 1950s is a cunning theological treatise that contradicted everyone: Buñuel's anti-clerical allies in Surrealism and the left; the Roman Catholic Church, which acclaimed the film; even the Spanish government, fooled into thinking he was close to a reconciliation with Francoism. Only Nazario makes sense — as a fool and one of the director's most admirable characters. Only Christ knows — and he gets to have the last laugh.
ILLUSION TRAVELS BY STREETCAR
La Ilusión Viaja en Tranvía, Dir: Luis Buñuel, Mexico 1953, 82', 16mm, b&w, Spainish with Eng. subtitles (unclassified 18+)
In this quite quixotic allegory from Buñuel's productive but underappreciated work making Mexico studio genre films, two drunken tram workers steal their battered tram and then find that attempts to return to their car are the biggest hangover of all. Here, more than anywhere, the richest pleasures of Buñuel's Mexican cinema can be felt. There is no sentiment about the often 'revolting' qualities of its peasant and working class characters. But there is picaresque delight in their earthy capacity to collectively 'find' the surrealist in the quotidian — most richly when the tram becomes a banquet of offal and a carnival of slaughterhouse labourers. This is perhaps Buñuel's humblest story, sharing with his slightly earlier Mexican Bus Ride (1951) a delight in the widescreen view of Mexican society. And you can't help having the suspicion that the paper-mâché the Genesis tableau that Buñuel presents early in the film is the most essential representation of the director's cosmology. Plus LAND WITHOUT BREAD (Las Hurdes, 1933, 30 mins), Buñuel’s unique, hyper-real social documentary about the almost pre-historic living conditions endured by the peasants of Northern Spain. Print courtesy Filmoteca de la UNAM.
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL
Dir: Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1962, 93 mins,35mm, b&w, Spanish with Eng. subtitles (M)
The guests at an elite Mexico City dinner party are inexplicably trapped at their dinning table. Abandoned by their waiters, then by the outside world and slowly by their wits, they survive on food scraps, a flock of passing sheep and even a roaming wild bear. But it's not long before social niceties and dinner jackets give way to mob rule. Winner of the FIPRESCI award at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, Buñuel's last Mexican-produced feature was a half-way house between his Mexican studio films of the 1950s and his art house hits of the late 60s. It gets in even harder on social satire of his earlier commercial features - but also sets us up for the brilliant adventures in narrative logic to come.
VIRIDIANA
Dir: Luis Buñuel, Mexico/Spain, 1961, 35mm, 90 mins, b&w, Spanish with Eng. subtitles (M)
The young novice Viridiana, on the verge of taking her vows, is invited to visit a distant, elderly uncle, Don Jaime. The Don makes certain ‘demands’ on her. But how far should kindness, faith and good works extend? Viridiana is a sort of closeted, virginal version of Buñuel’s early Nazario; idealistic, naive, her uncompromising faith sometimes doing more damage than the devil could ever do. Working with many of the cast who would become closely identified with his work in the 1960s and 70s (Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Silvia Pinal) Buñuel’s rise to international cinema stardom came with his belated first Spanish feature film and first European production in over three decades of filmmaking.
THE MILKY WAY
Dir: Luis Buñuel, France/Spain, 1969, 35mm, 98 mins, col., French/Italian/Latin with English subtitles (unclassified 18+)
On the road with two more of Buñuel’s Holy Fools, this time two French beggars clothing themselves in the spiritual cloth of pilgrimage to Spain’s holy city of Santiago de Compostela. A return bout with the dangers and genius of zealous Catholic faith, first explored in Nazarin, like all of the Buñuel’s cinematic dealings with the Church, you never can quite be certain of his position. There is endless fun with the corruption of clerical authority, absurdity of the Faithful and the cynicism of the Doubters (cameos as varied as Alain Cuny, Delphine Seyrig and Michel Piccoli as the Marquis de Sade). But in the end, its character’s dogged search for truth still has an odd quixotic charm. From the collection of the NFSA.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Abismos de Pasión, Dir: Luis Buñuel, 1953, Mexico, 91 mins, b&w, Spanish with Eng. subtitles (unclassified 18+)
Wuthering Heights seems at first to be firmly in Mexican cinema's 'ranchera' genre, like a south-of-the-border genre rebadge of Jezebel or Gone with the Wind. That is, until its darkly, sadistically handsome hero Alejandro whispers 'Catalina'. Thus, literature's most familiar codeword for romantic yearning suddenly unlocks the film's artistic derivations and Buñuel's intent. Like Robinson Crusoe (which Buñuel had previously brought to the screen in 1952) Emily Brontë's famously death- and sex-infused Gothic novel was a favourite of the surrealist's artistic circle in the 1920s, and its adaptation a long held ambition of the director. Realised within the constraints of Mexican genre cinema, the film may not have been quite the symbolist romance that Buñuel apparently intended, the director later stating his disappointment with the actors' distracting touches of Mexican cinema star power. But in some ways, it is all the richer, and perhaps more fantastic, for having this Latinised, pop novella undercurrent — all that tabloid desire, sadism and machismo swelling below its historical costume drama surfaces.
THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Cet obscur objet du désir Dir: Luis Buñuel, 1977, France/Spain, 102 mins, col., French/Spanish with Eng. subtitles (M)
Buñuel’s final masterpiece was a brilliant conceit: that no man is ever old enough to figure out what women want. To prove Buñuel’s point, Fernando Rey plays an aging Lothario, whose object of sexual obsession is literarily a split personality, the role being passed (tag-team like) between actresses Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet (cast after Last Tango in Paris star Maria Schneider fled from doing the part solo). Scripted by Buñuel’s perennial 1960s collaborator, Jean-Pierre Carrière, this is the director making a surrealist screwball comedy out of completely dark materials.
