Cet obscur objet du désir / That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel, 1977)Adam & Josh's takesBunuel's last film is a bit of a best-of album: you've got Fernando Rey being sexually repressed in some way and somewhat villainous but also sympathetic (especially without the sym- part), surrealist touches everywhere, socio-political instability and some awkward dubbing. There's even a call back to L'âge d'or, and probably others I missed. Ticking all the boxes, but resulting in what I found to be his most interesting film so far (bearing in mind that, outside of this marathon, I have only seen Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie).
While sex has been a dominant theme in the marathon, I don't think any of his other films are anywhere near as articulate when it comes to sex being an instrument of power. I think Adam & Josh gloss over how awful Conchita's character is, and that's a pretty important point. In Tristana, Deneuve is innocent and then corrupted by Rey, but here we have a man who is fascinated by this woman and wants to possess her, but she's not innocent at all. She is no better than him, similarly using sex to control him, by continually denying it to him but still stringing him along. Part of is out of material interest certainly, but I think it's more importantly an exact mirror (which there are a lot of in this film) of Rey's character : she's just better at it than him.
That's my reading anyway... the film is relatively ambiguous throughout, but I'm going to go ahead and count the whole Swan Lake thing as indicative of that. I spent a lot of the movie thinking about what Bunuel was doing with the two actresses playing the same character (complete with a winking nod to Swan Lake), and I was having a lot of trouble with it, because there's really no discernable pattern : the Madonna/Whore dichotomy doesn't really apply here, it's just tempting because the actresses look the respective parts. I think Bunuel might just mean it more generally as "there is more to this woman than appears", or at least that's all I can find.
I have no such reading for the terrorist angle. Adam & Josh suggest it's meant to be an indictment of Rey's character completely ignoring it because he's so obsessed... which I would then extend to her as well, but I guess in that case I don't find that particularly interesting, and it felt like a needless sprinkling of politics there to make the film seem more relevant, which seems completely unnecessary to me. Maybe Bunuel felt guilty for making all these films about sex instead of directly working against the Franco regime (though it's worth noting was in the process of imploding after the main man's death while this film was made). Maybe he's a mastermind and I don't get it, too.
Needless to say, I found this film to be very engaging, more than any of his other post 30's films so far... but I can't say I enjoyed it all that much either. I just think there's an inherent limit for me with Bunuel, I just find his style... unpleasant. He gets these great actors/actresses and they're generally giving very strong performances (certainly the case here for both Bouquet and Molina), but the supporting roles are generally pretty terrible, as is the case here with all the train passengers in the framing device... oh did I not mention the framing device ? Yeah, this film is a bit overstuffed. Nonetheless, it certainly feels like a culmination for his career, an astonishingly vital note to go out on.
7/10