Luis Buñuel’s final film explodes with eroticism, bringing full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flare, Buñuel uses two different actresses in the lead—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Angela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel, La Femme et le Pantin, That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harkens back to Buñuel’s brilliant surrealistic beginnings. —The Criterion Collection
Sent off for a Jesuit education by his prosperous Spanish parents, Luis Buñuel went on to attend the University of Madrid, where he first became interested in the burgeoning European film industry. Upon graduating from Paris’ Academie du Cinema, his first movie job was as an assistant to French-based directors Jean Epstein and Mario Nalpas. In partnership with an old friend, Spanish painter/sculptor Salvador Dali, Buñuel put together the three-reel surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1928), the film that features dead donkeys on a piano, a razor slashing an eyeball, and other deliberately shocking images that cineastes have either praised or damned for the past seven decades.
Buñuel’s first feature film, L’Age d’Or, was banned from public exhibition almost immediately from the moment of its 1930 premiere; its principal opponents were high-ranking members of the Catholic church, who condemned the film as savagely sacrilegious. After 1932’s Land Without Bread, an uncompromising… read more
There are not as many overt surrealist moments, a fact that may render the film in the eyes of some to be less Buñuelian, but nonetheless, the little absurd moments and the smallest quirks tell us that we are, in fact, witnessing the director at work. Even the most egregious 'joke,' that of casting two actresses, can be overlooked, making the film even more strange. It accomplishes a lot, and it is no small feat.
A film wrought from subtle provocations, but, as with so many of Bunuel's later films, the provocations fail because they are made for a less cynical age than ours.
Its depiction of male/female relationships could have made Bunuel's last film seem dated.But,we do appreciate his examination of obsession and manipulation. Another great performance from Fernando Rey.
An alluring young woman leads a nobleman to ruin, by first encouraging, then repelling his amorous advances. From Pierre Louÿs’ novel.
Thoughts on Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire? I am still in the process of digesting this but unlike Belle de Jour which I instantly loved, this film is still in that genius/pretentious… read review
An aging man on a departing train dumps a bucket of water over the head of a young girl with a beat up face. So begins That Obscure Object of Desire, the final film of surrealist master Luis… read review
One of the more appropriate titles for a film, “That Obscure Object of Desire” refers to a number of things. With the “object of desire” clearly alluding to women, the film challenges the notion that… read review