Avis des critiques

A French and Spanish co-production, That Obscure Object of Desire is of two minds, straddling the discrete worlds of man and woman, past and present, bourgeois and bohemian, domestic and urban... Set against the backdrop of a terrorist insurgency, That Obscure Object of Desire portrays sexual desire as a literal battleground, where the stakes are high and the opposition is a shapeshifter.

Mathieu does not want Conchita so much as he wants to own her. Hardly a surreal concept, and yet the way Buñuel banks off the actresses’ distinct personas, perpetually inverting the power dynamic, earns the film its most sneakily absurdist flourish.

That Obscure Object of Desire is surreal insofar as it depicts an extreme that is horrifically logical: the inability to express one's true emotions. The film presents a world in which a woman is capable of pathologically taunting a man who tries to buy her affection, if only because they cannot clearly communicate their honest desires to one another.

[A] typically subversive swansong... [The film's] protagonist may be detached from reality, but "That Obscure Object of Desire" proves that Buñuel certainly was not; even in his final years, Don Luis was as lucidly provocative as ever.

The film's most striking image comes late in the story, as Rey pauses before a shop window to watch with excited intensity as a seamstress sews up a tear in a bloodstained silk nightgown. The shot returns us to the very start of Buñuel's career, to the similarly sexualized gashed eyeball at the beginning of "Un Chien Andalou." But this time the rip is being repaired, rather than opened, reversing the trauma of sexuality but also suppressing it...

[Buñuel's] films maintain the power to inflame filmgoers still passionate about indulging their imaginations, encountering along the way things mysterious and outré, in an era that seems ever more inclined to empty spectacle and easy answers.

Full of echoes from Buñuel's earlier work, [the film] might almost be seen as a summation of his preoccupation with the connection between sex and violence... The sexual games are brilliantly and tantalisingly funny, but the film is meanwhile secretly pursuing another obscure object of desire: the terrorism which surfaces in various forms (moral, social, cultural, economic, psychological, and even political).

Buñuel draws his paradoxes—is it love or sex, sadism or masochism, life or death?—with a perfectly clear, perfectly impregnable style. The old surrealist created another masterpiece in this 1977 feature, his final film.

[The film] is a marvellous finale to a great career, funny, beautifully acted, outrageous. Back in 1978 I described it as "cold, glittering and deadly, like a Fabergé hand grenade". I stand by this opinion.

Bunuel’s eye for the absurd and ear for the driest of witty dialogue keeps the pace up, even if the to-and-fro of their would-be relationship verges on the edge of tiresome... Funny, bewildering and occasionally slightly frustrating, The Obscure Object of Desire is everything you would expect from Bunuel.

A seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire. It is the director’s last word on this, his great subject. It is thus a fitting conclusion to his illustrious career.

A culmination of the surreal, if the surreal can indeed culminate... Most interesting, though, is the fact that Conchita is played by two different actresses, who alternate scenes, a testament to the chameleonic nature of the female persona.