That Obscure Object of Desire

I was faced with further evidence of my absent-mindedness when I realised half-way into this film that the female antagonist was being played by two actresses. The device was an unplanned development (cf. my note on Discreet Charm) – Buñuel resorted to the idea after his first choice of actress balked at the sex scene. It works because it underlines the theme of the story, which is the incomprehensibility of the objects we desire. Conchita literally shapeshifts in front of an increasingly irritable Mathieu (played by Fernando Ray and voiced by Michel Piccoli – both Buñuel favourites). She constantly blows hot and cold on his courtship, to the point where the film starts flirting with misogyny.

It avoids it partly because of the word 'object' in the title, and that aforementioned sex scene. When Conchita finally gets the keys to her own house, she locks Mathieu out of it. And to prove that she is an independent woman who has simply used her objectification against her oppressor, she makes love to her handsome boyfriend on the floor in front of Mathieu's eyes. He tries to walk away, but he can't resist coming back to gaze on his desire. Not to get too David Thomson, but if there is a reason this film is in his top three, it's because of this scene – an encapsulation of how the moving image has been harnessed to project our desires back at us, so that we look on, spellbound.

Conchita flits between such statements of her independence and professions of devotion to Mattieu. She even finds an explanation for this final outrage against Mathieu's pride (it was a test of his constancy, apparently). She's either a mad lover or a manipulative witch. Either way, we can't get rid of her. And would we really want to?

This little romcom is played out against a background of increasingly violent terrorist attacks. Like in Discreet Charm, there's the suggestion that the quotidian complications of bourgeois life paper over the cracks of class warfare. Jean-Claude Carrière (Buñuel's co-writer on most of his last films) says Buñuel was increasingly paranoid about a collapse in civility. He predicted that even family relations will become mediated by terrorism – siblings bickering with bombs rather than words. Buñuel is known for being a scourge of bourgeois pieties, but I wonder if in this film he goes some way towards repudiating his earlier, revolutionary self, and making peace with the hypocrisies of his class. That last shot of a woman mending the fabric of a blood-splattered dress seems to suggest so.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

The germ from which the film developed was Buñuel's interest in repetition as an aid to memory – his frequent writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière links this to the fact that a member of Buñuel's family suffered from dementia. This morphed into the idea of having dinner party plans be constantly upset by surreal and ridiculous intrusions. The title was thought up after the script was finished, with the aim to give a new perspective on the film.

This background reveals that the final version of Discreet Charm is rather removed from where Buñuel started. Appropriate, perhaps, given his surrealist credentials. His motives may not have been more sophisticated than to provoke some gentle (but never judgmental) laughter at the expense of the French upper crust. Some of the scenarios are quite funny, but there's something else going on here.

First the dreams: of detectives, mafiosi, terrorists, deathbeds and ghosts. The power of the army, the police, and the political class are always lurking under the surface of these polite dinners. Fernando Ray is an ambassador of a made-up Latin American banana republic, and he's always paranoid that his corruption will be exposed. At one point the group sit down to dinner only to have a curtain lift and reveal them all to a theatre audience, who start jeering when they can't recite their lines. Soldiers and policemen keep reciting dreams of torture and murder as ladies sit down to eat, cutting through the small talk with tales of horror and loss. In all these scenarios, the pressure to remain charming and discreet is a source of deep seated anxiety.

And then there's the framing device. The opening credits sequence is composed of shots looking out of a car as it drives through the night – only occasionally are features of the road and streets illuminated by the headlights. The characters have chauffeured cars driving them around throughout the film, it's one of the signs of their privilege. The ending sequence (which also appears twice during the film) is of the six characters walking down a stretch of road in the middle of nowhere and in bright daylight. Perhaps this is a levelling measure. Rather than locked away from the world and meandering in the darkness of their own closed society, Buñuel finally allows his troupe a breath of fresh air, and a dose of real experience.

It can be read in lots of ways. Perhaps it was also arrived at by accident.

Tristana

Quite a sprawling and indulgent picture, unlike the last two Buñuel films I've seen and blogged. It's shot in Toledo and set in the 1930s, a place and time that has personal significance for the director, and may have encouraged digressions and superfluities. The strengths of the film lie in the two leads. Fernando Rey plays a bourgeois anarchist, with all the hypocrisy that entails. Buñuel sees not a little of himself in Rey, so the mockery is moderated. While the character pontificates about freedom, at home he behaves like a tyrant. Worse, he seduces his ward and then gets dreadfully jealous when she yearns to escape his clammy grasp. But Buñuel allows some tenderness to seep in, particularly after his pseudo daughter becomes disabled. Deneuve reprises her role of chaste maiden learning about her own desires. But in the second half of the film she becomes darker, a sexual exhibitionist and would-be murderer.

The best moments in the film are where the quirks and about-turns of the two characters shine through – Deneuve's pleasure in choosing (even when the choices are near identical), Rey's insistence that all work that isn't pleasurable is base, Deneuve revealing her breasts to her deaf childhood playmate, Rey drinking chocolate with the priests. The one note of surrealism is a recurring dream Deneuve has of Rey's severed and bloody head as the clapper of a bell – a symbol of her sexual desire, her violent urges, and of her rebellion against the church.

Belle De Jour

The shot that encapsulates the whole film might be the one establishing the final scene, in which Séverine's house is overlayed with the forest from her fantasies – the two worlds of reality and the imagination reunited. Séverine is a bourgeois housewife whose husband is completely devoted to her. Her masochistic sexuality is suppressed, and she cannot be intimate with him. Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière apparently talked to prostitutes, madams, psychiatrists and psychologists in order to compile real material for the film and try to portray female desire accurately.* Carrière stresses that they (being male filmmakers) were amateurs in the field, but it's nonetheless interesting that there's very little that smacks of the male gaze in the final film. Deneuve wasn't happy with the shots of the black see-through veil, but on the whole nudity is sparse and the camera cuts as soon as the sex starts. Buñuel seems more interested in exploring the weirdest sexual kinks he can find, all with the intention to make us let go of our hang-ups and accept the crazy people we are. The violent but beautiful criminal youth is little more that a plot device. The spirit of the film is probably best embodied by the louche Michel Piccoli, a rich libertine who is entirely at ease with humanity's perversions, and whose interventions help Séverine come to terms with her sexuality, and finally reunite her with her husband.


*Séverine's masochism grew out of the need to fit the character into the plot (supplied by a novel Buñuel didn't much care for), so only a particular facet of female desire is explored in the film.

The Diary of a Chambermaid

"In Buñuel's films, all men are facets of the libido, all women resemblances of love" says David Thomson, my trusted guide to the history of cinema. Much as I disapprove of this reflex to assign genders to character traits, it's difficult not to warm to Jeanne Moreau – who seems to have wandered out of heaven and into a depraved and dangerous 1930s French countryside. Surrealism and symbol are a muted presence. We meet Little Red Riding Hood and the huntsman at the beginning, but the latter is a useless clown, and the former is unable to defend herself from the wolf in the forest. She is raped and killed, and the chambermaid takes it upon herself to avenge her death. In an early scene she hands the little girl an apple – perhaps suggesting that what men see as temptation is only ever supposed to be kindness. The villain is an intriguing creation, swearing loyalty to army, religion and nation, a believer in order in every particular. But he corners Moreau, and accuses her of having the same soul as he does. Is this true? Thomson's reading makes me doubt it. Moreau is a worldly Parisienne. Everyone in the countryside assumes she used to be a whore – but she's there to reflect what others want to see in her. She's the vehicle for Buñuel's critiques, and an angel caught up in the obscene affairs of human beings. She's not a real person.