Belle de jour

This is how ‘Belle de jour’ starts:

Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is driving along a country lane in a landau, her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) by her side. He tries to embrace her and, when she spurns him, complains of her frigidity. Ordering the coachmen to stop, he enlists their help in bodily removing her from the carriage, hauling her into the woods and binding her to a tree. Pierre rips her blouse, exposing her back, and orders them to flog her. Then to have their way with her. The younger of the two grins sadistically as he slips free of his braces and starts towards her.

So far, so misogynistic; but Buñuel immediately cuts to Séverine, sitting up in bed, nightgown demurely buttoned up to the neck, a dreamy look on her face. Pierre wanders in from the bathroom and asks what she’s thinking about. “You,” she replies.

As ‘Belle de jour’ progresses, the question of reality and fantasy, of what is in the mind and how far it can be acted upon, comes to define the film to such an extent that the ending – I’ll leave the spoilers under wraps – throws this question over the entire 96-minute running time.

Agitation of the mind? You betcha! Agitation of the libido, too, given how memorably Séverine makes the transformation from glacial trophy wife to uninhibited seductress. It’s a transformation that occurs under the roof of an establishment run by the purringly sapphic Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page)* – a place with limited staff (there only ever seem to be the same three girls working there) but a loyal clientele.

The regulars include a boorish businessman who demands champagne, complains that it’s properly chilled and treats Séverine roughly; an aristocrat who has her dress in a diaphanous winding sheet and lie still and silent in a coffin while he delivers a hushed eulogy then crawls under the coffin (the way it rocks and Séverine’s rolled eyes when she peeks over the side leave you in no doubt as to what he’s doing down there); and an oriental gentleman whose predilections involve something he keeps in an ornate enamelled box, one glance at which is enough to have one of the girls turn him down flat, but which seems to give Séverine no small degree of pleasure. Naturally, what’s in the box is never revealed; it’s just one of many gleeful enigmas Buñuel incorporates into the film. Likewise Séverine’s involvement with Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), a foppishly dressed hood with a knife in his walking cane and holes in his socks – does he really take drastic action against Pierre in a jealous rage, or is it all in Séverine’s mind? And if so, is it what she fears might happen or what she wants to happen?

“Belle de jour” is the name Séverine assumes when she commences employment with Madame Anaïs (or does she? a scene where she hesitates to enter the building, walks away and ends up sitting on a park bench could be the reality of things and every subsequent scene at the brothel a figment of her imagination; who knows?) – thus the central enigma, for me, is when is she Séverine and when is she Belle de jour? Approach the film with this in mind and you can watch it endlessly and put a different spin on things every time.

There’s a henge in the English village of Avebury (in Wiltshire). Urban legend has it that if you try counting the stones which form the circle, you’ll never arrive at the same number twice. ‘Belle de jour’ is like that; it’s peppered with so many deliciously odd moments – curiously interconnected but ultimately evasive (the two references to cats, for instance, or Pierre being distracted by a wheelchair on a street corner) – that however many times you watch it, further ambiguities are revealed.



* Séverine is a feminisation of Séverin, the hero of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’. Anaïs references Anaïs Nin, the lover of Henry Miller and author of ‘Delta of Venus’.

The Phantom of Liberty

How many times have you seen one of these scenarios in a movie?

A child goes missing, prompting a tense police investigation.

A sniper takes up a position at a high window.

A middle-class dinner party reveals bourgeois hypocrisies.

Here’s how Buñuel does them:

The child is present throughout the drama, helpfully providing a description of herself for the benefit of the officer heading the investigation.

The sniper is tried, sentenced to death and then blithely walks out of the courtroom to applause and public adulation, shaking hands and signing autographs.

The guests sit on toilets around a plush table; occasionally excusing themselves to small, private cubicles where they hungrily but guiltily eat.

It would be easy to describe ‘The Phantom of Liberty’ as episodic; little more than a collection of sketches (an aesthetic enhanced by more than one visual punchline that feels like it’s wandered in from a Monty Python episode). But it’s actually a masterclass in structure. I’m tempted to invoke Robert Altman here – the Robert Altman of ‘Nashville’ and ‘Short Cuts’ – but whereas Altman’s brilliantly juggled ensemble pieces actually resolve most of the stories, Buñuel takes delight in diversions and digressions, following his protagonists into a scene and establishing a dynamic to that scene (a man goes to see his doctor; will the diagnosis be serious?) only to transfer his attention to a subsidiary character (a nurse interrupts the consultation to ask permission to leave; a family crisis has occurred) who then exits the scene and becomes the focus of next sequence (the nurse is unable to continue her journey due to bad weather and stops at a country inn) where the narrative is then shaped by other characters (a group of monks; a gregarious middle class couple whose social interests including entertaining strangers and indulging a little SM).

The genius of ‘The Phantom of Liberty’ is that these narrative digressions never seem random. The film unfolds as if obeying some elusive internal logic. Buñuel skewers genre conventions, avoids a narrative through-line and sidesteps resolutions to present a film where everyone and no-one is the main character. A film where a postman and an ostrich can wander through a couple’s bedroom and the ostrich resurface at the denouement (not that Buñuel ever bothered with the denouement in the traditional sense) to give the film is most evasive yet memorable image; a film where a group of monks pray for a woman’s ill relatives then stick around to play poker with her afterwards (using religious paraphernalia in lieu of money); where a District Attorney keeps a sepulchral tryst with his dead sister, is arrested and questioned by his replacement/doppelgänger/alter ego (you decide) after which the two men join forces to tackle an uprising at a zoo.

A flight of imaginative satire; a thumbed nose to convention, conformism and social/religious hypocrisy – ‘The Phantom of Liberty’ is Buñuel at his most Buñuelian.

The Diary of a Chambermaid

Ostensibly, it seems quite easy to get a handle on ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’. The opening scenes set it up as an upstairs-downstairs satire on class distinctions and social hypocrisy. It also comes across, structurally and in terms of narrative, as one of Buñuel’s more ‘traditional’ offerings.

It’s a different story by the end, though. Exquisitely poised satire and a rigorous examination of sexual politics are bound up with a murder mystery and the machinations of a heroine as duplicitous and on-the-make as her monied employers, and played out against a backdrop of racism, social protest and the threat of revolution.

The title suggests a heady cocktail of secrets and the boudoir, but ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ – for all that Buñuel throws in some comedy in the form of an old lecher with a shoe fetish – is a dark, sober, reflective work that localises its themes and concerns (a chateau and its grounds as a microcosm for France) before opening out into wider, more explicitly political mise-en-scene come the final reel.

The plot concerns Celestine (Jeanne Moreau), the chambermaid of the title, who takes up a position in at a chateau owned by Monsieur Rabour (Jean Ozenne) and ruled over with frigid discipline by his daughter Madame Monteil (Françoise Lugagne), who controls the purse strings, lacerates the staff with her sharp tongue and turns a not-quite blind eye to the (attempted) philanderings of her husband (Michel Piccoli).

Celestine tows the line to Madame Monteil, keeps Monsieur Monteil on the hop without actually letting him get his way, indulges Monsieur Rabour to a certain (non-sexual) degree, and quietly sets out to better herself. Initially clashing with anti-semitic groundsman Joseph (Georges Geret), who may or may not be responsible for the rape and murder of a young girl, Celestine even uses his attentions to further her schemes.

Full disclosure: I watched ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ for the first time yesterday and lacking any great understanding of the specific political references, I feel I need to go off and do some background reading, fill in the blanks, then reapproach the film. I’m probably doing neither the film or myself any favours by attempting to write about it just yet.

Most of the titles I’ve written about in this Buñuel mini-season are old favourites. A couple – ‘The Young’, ‘Tristana’ – I’ve come to cold but formed an opinion of straightaway. ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ is something I’ll come back to on the blog maybe a few months or a year or two down the line; something I need to engage with a little more deeply; dig away at a little more. I’m convinced that the last scene in particular is freighted with implications: I need to get under the film’s skin. It’s already started to get under mine.

Tristana

‘Tristana’ kicks off with two brilliant scenes.

In the first, a football match between deaf mutes erupts into argument after a blatant foul – all in the most demonstrative sign language. It shouldn’t be funny and it’s certainly not politically correct. But it’s definitely the former and the hell with the latter.

In the second, the predatory Don Lope (Fernando Rey) strolls across a piazza, tweaking his moustache in suggestive manner. Hailing a young woman (who’s probably old enough to be his granddaughter), he asks where she’s going. “To find a sweetheart,” she gaily replies. “You’ve found him,” Don Lope leers. She protests that he’s too old for her. “I’m not too old,” Don Lope assures her; “the devil’s been dead longer than I’ve been alive.”

Fantastic stuff. Oh, that the rest of the film had played out in like manner.

‘Tristana’ is the only “blip” in the string of masterpieces that define the last two decades of Buñuel’s career – from ‘Viridiana’ to his swansong ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’.

An adaptation of a novel by Benito Perez Galdos, the story sees the young and innocent Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) delivered into Don Lope’s care following the death of her parents. The old lecher soon corrupts her. Spurning him, Tristana takes up with debonair artist Horacio (Franco Nero). Two years later, the increasingly lachrymose Don Lope jumps at the chance to have her back when a serious illness and the amputation of her leg pre-empt a parting of the ways between her and Horacio. But the Tristana who resumes residence in the Don’s household, lost limb notwithstanding, is more beautiful and infinitely less passive than the one who left. The stations are reversed.

And that’s basically it.

In the hands of Douglas Sirk it could have been unintentionally hilarious. In the hands of Pedro Almodovar, intentionally so. As a Buñuel film, however, it’s curiously anaemic. Re-uniting the director with Deneuve three years after ‘Belle de Jour’, none of the erotic frisson and barrier-pushing intimations of perversity are present. Although Deneuve was never better than when playing ice queens, she seems awkward as Tristana. Franco Nero – never better than as Django – just seems out of place. Thanks be for the presence of Fernando Rey: magnificent, mischievous and bristling with amoral cool in virtually every film he appeared in (and certainly those he made with Buñuel), he’s the only hint of life in ‘Tristana’.

What truly disappoints, given Buñuel’s aversion to critics foisting ‘meanings’ onto his work, is how thuddingly obvious the Freudian imagery is. Aside from a last-minute sequence of ingeniously orchestrated images guaranteed to instigate ongoing debate as to their narrative implication, it’s all so ordinary. And Buñuel was never a film-maker to whom the ordinary was suited.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

There’s an intriguing documentary on the Optimum Releasing ‘Luis Buñuel Collection’ box set edition of ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ which posits that the sequences of the main cast walking along an apparently endless road in the middle of nowhere is a metaphor for their collective death, and that the set pieces in between are indicative of an internal or emotional journey from denial to inevitable acceptance.

On one hand: yeah, maybe.

The devolution of the latter half of the film into a series of awakenings from increasingly bizarre situations of social embarrassment which turn out to be bad dreams does seem to bear out a reading of the film in which concrete reality does not exist and the bourgeoisie are subject to the breakdown (i.e. the death) of their own empty value systems – their ‘discreet charm’ masks infidelities, hypocrisies and vices sexual, alcoholic and narcotic*.

On the other hand: nah, maybe not.

Buñuel wasn’t just a surrealist, but a purist. His films are what they are. He wasn’t impressed with the critical necessity to foist meanings or interpretations on his imagery, and he always refused to ‘explain’ his work. There’s a wonderful story that he reacted with a mixture of horror and despair when an actor announced that they had finally understood their character’s psychology. Indeed, Buñuel gave little direction to his actors. His titles can’t always be taken at face value, either. ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ was assigned to the finished screenplay, pretty much randomly, after Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière couldn’t agree on anything else.

His films are what they are. And what ‘TDCOTB’ is, is a black comedy about a group of friends who want to enjoy a meal together. They are frustrated by, variously, a misunderstanding over the date, a corpse laid to rest in the back room of a restaurant, an infantry battalion on manoeuvres, a political argument that ends in a shooting, a café that’s run out of refreshments, incarceration at the hands of an overzealous policemen on a night when the holding cells are haunted by the ghost of a brutal officer (a brilliant pastiche of the horror genre which Buñuel blithely deems “the night of the bloody sergeant”), and – in perhaps the only example in cinema of a play-within-a-dream-within-a-film – the revelation that the table they are seated at is laid with set dressings instead of salad dressings and they’re actually the ill-prepared and stagefright-struck cast in a theatrical production!

What ‘TDCOTB’ is, also, is funny as hell. The dead restaurateur scene, which plays like a ‘Monty Python’ sketch, sets the tone early on: the humour is po-faced, absurdist and steeped in the macabre. Buñuel nails his usual targets – politicians, the middle classes, the church – with unerring accuracy, subverts audience expectations (or confirms them if you’re an aficionado of the director) with playful panache, and delivers a supremely entertaining bit of cinema in the process.

And those enigmatic scenes of the main cast walking along an apparently endless road in the middle of nowhere? I like to think it’s about some elegantly dressed people walking along a road. It’s kind of like the hat blowing through the woods in ‘Miller’s Crossing’: it’s utterly memorable and cooler than cool … and it’s no more or less than a hat blowing through the woods.




*Fernando Rey’s character, a foreign ambassador, uses the diplomatic bag to smuggle drugs and worries that “the Marseilles gang” might be onto him – a beautifully sneaky nod to his iconic role in ‘The French Connection’ the previous year.

The Young One

Traver (Bernie Hamilton) is a black jazz musician on the run from a false allegation of raping a white woman. Miller (Zachary Scott) is a gruff racist living in almost total isolation on an island. Evalyn (Key Meersman) is the thirteen-year-old granddaughter of Millers’ only neighbour on the island, now deceased.

Miller takes it upon himself to look after the girl (this chiefly consists of slapping her, yelling at her and treating her like a skivvy) until a preacher from the mainland can be sent for to “see about her situation”. It’s not long, however, until Miller’s designs on Evie are progressing way beyond her capabilities as a cook and housekeeper. He tells her she’s becoming a woman and rhapsodizes about how good she’d look in fine dresses and high heels. Ladies and gentlemen, the poor man’s Humbert Humbert is in da house.

Also in da house, or at least on the island, is our friend Traver, going to ground as part of his lynch-mob-avoidance campaign. He strikes up an offbeat friendship with Evie, while earning the disdain of Miller, who addresses him variously as “boy” and “nigger”. “I didn’t even let ’em call me that in the army,” Traver growls. The battle lines are clear. A war of nerves ensues as Travers’ attempts to depart the island are foiled by Miller, while Miller’s ploys to gain standing in Evie’s eyes are shown up and subverted by Travers’ friendship with him.

To quote Dominique Russell in her scholarly but thoroughly readable article on Buñuel at Senses of Cinema, “ ‘The Young One’, though slow-paced and rather stilted, is nevertheless interesting in the way it frames racism and sexism as parallel discourses”. The racism is depicted with blunt ugliness (Miller is joined, in the last reel, by an associate whose bigotry is even more pronounced), while the sexual element of the film is tad more implicit. It’s the latter, however, that is the least easy to watch. Although Buñuel never quite objectifies his heroine the way Kubrick and Lyne do in their respective versions of Lolita, he emphasizes the cusp-of-sexuality angle just enough to implicate the viewer. Moreover, while the theme of older male pursuing considerably younger woman prefigures the rampant lechery of Fernando Rey’s characterisations in ‘Tristana’ and ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, Buñuel’s heroines in these films (a) are of age, and (b) turn the tables on their pursuer. Evie, after some half-hearted initial resistance, is utterly passive.

When Millers’ friend and the priest turn up at the end (the latter rare in Buñuel’s oeuvre as a man of the cloth who is not set up as a target for broadly painted satire), the slow-burn tension that has developed reaches boiling point. Fortunately, things never fully tip into the kind of histrionic melodrama many directors would have wrought from these ingredients.

“Slow paced and stilted” – Russell is absolutely right. The short running time drags. There are several incongruous moments (“quit your bawling” Miller exhorts a completely dry-eyed Evie at one point). Zachary Scott’s performance swings between half-decent character study and blatant scenery chewing; Key Meersman is luminous (there’s a fresh-faced innocence to her that’s slightly, oh-so-slightly underpinned by a Liv Tyler kind of sultriness) but given little to work with by the script; and only Bernie Hamilton – probably best known as Captain Dobey in ‘Starsky and Hutch’ – brings the film fully to life.

Still, ‘The Young One’ is interesting for the pointers it offers towards the latter stage of Buñuel’s career, and as easily the more interesting of only two films he made in English.

The Milky Way

“Thanks be to God I am an atheist.”

Perhaps Luis Buñuel’s most famous quote. And nowhere in his filmography is the absurdity of religion more fully expressed than in ‘The Milky Way’. And yet the structure and content of the film (it’s a morality play about a pilgrimage; all of the theological debate is taken from bona fide religious texts) demonstrate an approach to the material deeper and more intellectual than mere satirical spoofery.

And then there’s Buñuel’s Jesus (played by Bernard Verley): avoiding all the reverent clichés typical of portrayal’s of Christ, here we have Christ as identifiably human – he laughs, he banters with the disciples, he even starts to shave his beard at one point until Mary protests that it suits him – grinning at the complement, he throws away bowl of water he was about to use.

Perhaps the only other film that depicts Christ as a man, not as some ethereal being possessed of a zen-like stillness, is Pasolini’s ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’ (the indigenous title, ‘Il vangelo secondo Matteo’ leaves out the word “Saint”). Pasolini, too, was an atheist.

‘The Milky Way’ starts with myriad scenes of roads. Cars, vans and lorries go hurtling by. Apposite, since what follows is essentially a road movie. Hands up everyone who thought ‘The Straight Story’ – mode of transport: ride-on mower – was the slowest road movie in cinema. ‘The Milky Way’ beats it by a short head. It’s a road movie where the protagonists walk.

The protagonists are Pierre (Paul Frankeur), an old man with the appearance of a tramp, and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), a younger man who wears a pretty cool leather jacket. They’re undertaking a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain where they intend to pay worship at the tomb of James the apostle. En route, they meet an inn-keeper and a police officer who debate the doctrine of transubstantiation with a priest (the priest takes umbrage at certain comments, throws his glass of wine in the cop’s face and is promptly escorted back to a mental institution); two fellow pilgrims who take a detour (geographically and through time) to dispute dogma regarding the Holy Trinity; a nun who is rather too enthusiastic about sharing the suffering of Christ on the cross; a Jesuit and a Jansenist who decide to settle their differences* in a duel and appoint our heroes as their seconds; and the pious headmistress of a girls’ school whose theological brainwashing of her young charges is applauded during an open day.

This latter is simultaneously the funniest, most chilling and most subversive scene in a film that compacts a plethora of hilarious and subversive moments into its pacy and endlessly entertaining hour-and-a-half running time. Pierre and Jean have happened upon the private school, gatecrashed the open day and successfully begged food and wine. They lounge on the beautifully-kept lawn along with the parents and other visitors while the headmistress presents “a prologue by our young girls”. These impeccably mannered little moppets, not one of them older than ten, take the stage and curtsey, then proceed to recite a catechism of unforgiveness: “If anyone holds that the sacrifice of the Mass is a blasphemy against the sacrifice of Christ who died upon the cross … anathema upon him! If anyone holds that God’s commandments are impossible to keep even for one who is justified and in a state of grace … anathema upon him!” Buñuel cuts to a group of grim-faced revolutionaries taking aim at a white-robed figure up against a wall. The scene cuts back to the school as the gunfire rings out. One of the parents looks around as if the sounds were coterminous to the current setting; “Is there a shooting range around here?” he asks. “No, it’s me,” Jean replies, totally deadpan: “I was imagining they were shooting a Pope.”

It’s an either/or kind of scene. You’ll either find it acerbically funny (like me) or you won’t. No inbetween. (It’s Buñuel playing the Pope, by the way.)

The ending is pitched on a similar level – funny, but barbed with the sharpest cynicism. Pierre and Jean reach Compostela, but are tempted by the devil (in the shapely shape of Delphine Seyrig in a too-tight blouse: hell, I’d be tempted) and don’t make it to the shrine. They also miss the Second Coming. Two other drifters do. Encountering the returned Jesus, he cures them of their blindness. A wickedly effective last shot suggests, however, that a miracle isn’t necessarily a cure.



*Jesuit: I know that you … still deny the true doctrine of Grace.
Jansenist: In the fallen state of nature, inward grace is irresistible.
Jesuit: Do you dare repeat that in a more retired spot?
Jansenist: Sir, I am at your disposal.

New Year's resolutions

First and foremost, a Happy and Prosperous New Year to all.

Here’s to a 2009 that gives us better news (enough with the ‘credit crunch’ doom and gloom, already; I’m convinced this any-minute-now recession would evaporate and the economy take an upswing if only the media would shut the fuck up about it) and better movies.

Here on Planet Agitation, I think I’ve just about got myself into a writing discipline that balances work on my novel-in-progress (about 22,000 words completed thus far) with new material for the blog. And with a few dirt-cheap January sale DVD acquisitions, I won’t be short of things to write about.

My aim is to post at least two articles a week (although I’m giving another shout to anyone who wants to contribute anything: any and all cinema related musings to opentosuggestions.neil@lycos.co.uk, please), with the weekend article given over to Personal Faves. Next up: cinema’s finest claymation double-act.

Later this month, on January 22nd to be exact, I’ll be celebrating the birthday of one of my favourite actresses – the oft underrated Diane Lane – by kicking off a three-day Diane-Fest (or a four-dayer if I can get hold of a copy of ‘The Big Town’ by then).

In February, the Second Annual Hitch-Fest will include ‘North By Northwest’ from the Personal Faves list. File under ‘fest’ during the following months these luminaries: Werner Herzog, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar; not to mention, during the latter stages of ’09 the obligatory Third Annual Dirk-Fest.

Just let me recover from this hangover and deal with going back to work tomorrow, then it’s back to business …

PERSONAL FAVES: That Obscure Object of Desire

Starting with the title, let’s ask: the object of whose desire, and how come she’s so obscure? Our, ahem, ‘hero’ and narrator Mathieu (the incomparable Fernando Rey) is the man who’s got it bad. The object (how flattering a term!) is dancer Conchita, and so skewed is Mathieu’s perspective that he sees her as two women. One, voluptuous and sensual (played by Angela Molina) inflames his passions; the other, elegant and cool to the point of icy (Carole Bouquet), continually denies him.

We’re in Luis Bunuel territory, all right.

The usual targets are lined up (Bunuel’s films often come across as the cinematic equivalent of a shooting range): the middle classes* (Mathieu is a wealthy businessman who utilises his contacts in the legal profession to get his way – or resorts to bribery if that fails); the church (Conchita’s supposedly God-fearing mother takes Mathieu up on a financial offer vis-à-vis her daughter); and the state (the battle of the sexes is played out against a backdrop of terrorist activity).

This is a film that could have been made this year and would have proved scathingly satirical and ridden to box office glory on a wave of controversy. Bunuel made it thirty-one years ago.

Mathieu narrates his saga of desire and frustration to his fellow passengers during a train journey. Present in his compartment – and sly personifications of these themes – are a lawyer (officialdom), a psychiatrist (apposite, given the nature of Mathieu’s obsession and the duality of his perception of Conchita), and a mother and daughter (symbolic of the family unit Mathieu is bastardising in buying off Conchita’s mother). The funniest scene in the film has the teenage daughter brusquely sent out into the corridor as Mathieu describes his night of non-consummation.

Presupposing Steve Martin’s hilarious almost-couplings with Kathleen Turner in ‘The Man With Two Brains’, Mathieu very nearly gets his way. Conchita, furious at her mother’s bargain with Mathieu, nonetheless agrees to live with him but begins treating him as little more than a sugar daddy, sponging off him while holding out against the necessity of intercourse for as long as possible.

Their first night sees him enter the bedroom with Conchita (Molina); she excuses herself to the bathroom and dons a nightgown, leaving it unbuttoned, her décolletage exposed. The Conchita who rejoins him (Bouquet) is dressed demurely and allows him the briefest of caresses before saying, “Not yet, I’m not in the mood now.”

Mathieu becomes forceful. Conchita acquiesces, but insists he extinguish the candles. “Don’t celebrate your victory too soon,” she warns as darkness embraces them. Grunting in shock, he stumbles out of bed and re-illuminates the candles. Beneath her nightdress, a silken arrangement of ribbons and bows; quite alluring, but preventative in its design. Or, to put it bluntly, if Ann Summers had designed a chastity belt, that’s what Mathieu finds himself doing battle with.

“I struggled with it for fifteen minutes,” he tells his fellow passengers sadly. “I was incensed … It was impossible to remove it.”

The final bitter joke of ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’ is, of course, that Mathieu never gets his wicked little way. Bunuel’s subject is the concept of a woman for whom one’s passion is unrequited as having two sides: the yin and yang of erotic allure and physical unattainability. Casting two actresses in the same role is the perfect realisation. And in structuring an entire film around a besotted man being denied sex, Bunuel achieves cinema’s most absolute – and phenomenally witty – comment on sexual frustration.



*Not for nothing is one of his most famous works entitled ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise’.