The Discreet Charm of Luis Bunuel

“What interests me is a life full of contradictions and ambiguities,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer in the early 1960s.  “Mystery is beautiful.  To die and disappear forever doesn’t seem horrible to me but perfect.  The possibility of being eternal, on the other hand, horrifies me.”

With his death Buñuel ironically has joined the ranks of fellow Spaniards Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Goya and Picasso as deathless contributors to their times.  Born at the dawn of the new century, Buñuel came of age in Madrid in the twenties amid a constellation of creative geniuses that included García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Salvador Dalí, Vicente Aleixandre and many others.  The “Generation of ’27” or “Generation of Friendship” blew Spanish poetry wide open with their adventurous excursions in the unconscious.  Without an esthetic doctrine but with a visceral apprehension of the terrors of the postwar world, reading Joyce and Freud and Góngora and each other, traveling to Paris and New York, young Spanish poets invented their own distinctive versions of surrealism.  One of Buñuel’s earliest known works—a poem called “The Rainbow and the Poultice” (1927)—begins, “How many priests will fit on a gangplank?”  He spent the next five decades razzing the Catholic Church, among other institutions. 

The development of film technology provided Buñuel with the perfect medium for his mischievous imagination.  During his fifty years of making movies—from Un chien andalou in the late twenties to That Obscure Object of Desire in the late seventies—he never stopped experimenting with ways to tell an enigmatic story, remaining strange-but-true to the real-life mysteriousness of everyday experience.  While one of the most admired and influential of all directors (Alain Resnais’s masterpiece, Providence, alludes eloquently to Buñuel), the Spaniard’s style or range of styles was uniquely idiosyncratic.  A pioneer surrealist, he put his movies together like poems, emphasizing evocative qualities of particular images and associations rather than enslaving himself to a linear narrative logic which might put the audience at ease or encourage complacency.  Fantastic images—a cow in a bed, a self-propelled coffin snaking its way through the desert, a rubber chicken falling off a silver tray—are generally presented in a matter-of-fact manner, which makes them seem all the more astounding.  Usually humorous, always provocative, Buñuel’s movies invariably challenge the viewer’s assumptions and expectations while skewering the status quo.  A consummate satirist, his use of irony is never cruel but consistently humane: there’s something touchingly vulnerable about his characters even at their most obtuse and idiotic; he never sets himself up as their superior.

Buñuel wrote and directed nearly forty films, many of which are among the most memorable ever to reach the screen.  The classic 17-minute Un chien andalou was followed in 1930 by another surrealistic landmark, L’age d’or, the first of his merciless satires on the Catholic Church.  Then came the phenomenal documentary Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), a nightmare “travelog” account of a journey through a poor and barren region of western Spain.  The contrast between the wild inventiveness of his first two films and the sober factualism of Land Without Bread is startling, but what they have in common is a visual hunger for reality, a clear-eyed intent to pierce the veil of appearances.  The famous opening sequence of Un chien andalou, where an eyeball in closeup is slit by a straight razor (wielded by the director himself), stands as a fitting image for the thrust of his entire career. 

The Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship of Generalísimo Franco meant death or exile for Buñuel and many of his contemporaries.  A partisan of the Republic, he came to the United States in the late thirties with the intention of making films on events in Spain, but none of these projects materialized.  He worked as a dubber and translator on dozens of documentaries for the Museum of Modern Art and later on several films for Warner Bros. but discovered that there was little room in Hollywood for his unsettling brand of imagination.  The one scene for which he was responsible in a Hollywood film is the sequence in The Beast with Five Fingers where Peter Lorre observes with creeping distress a disembodied hand crawling up his chest—a typically disturbing Buñuelian image.  (In 1944 Buñuel and Man Ray planned a film called The Sewer of Los Angeles, which was never produced.  One can only dream or hallucinate what this movie might have been like.)

After a period of obscurity in Mexico cranking out grade-B movies, Buñuel surfaced again in the fifties with a number of unforgettable low-budget films, among them Los olvidados (literally “the forgotten ones,” released in the US as The Young and the Damned), the story of a couple of teenage street boys living hand-to-mouth on the fringes of Mexico City.  Fearlessly realistic yet charged with the lyric energy of adolescence—and one dream sequence from the depths of a dawning sexual subconscious—it is one of the most powerful treatments of poverty ever committed to celluloid.  Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride), Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (a hilarious adaptation of Defoe’s novel) and Illusion Travels by Streetcar are among his lighter and equally brilliant works from the early fifties—the latter being the tale of a couple of Mexico City transit workers who take a streetcar out for a phantom all-night ride after the car barn is closed.  It captures beautifully Buñuel’s affection for the invisible people who are the soul of cities. 

With age Buñuel’s vision became increasingly penetrating and audacious.  Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Chambermaid, Simon of the Desert, Belle du Jour, The Milky Way, Tristana (all produced during his sixties) and his masterworks of the 1970s—The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty (also translatable as “The Specter of Freedom”) and That Obscure Object of Desire—whether made in French or Spanish, Paris or Mexico or Spain, color or black and white, gently but vividly strip religious piety and middle-class respectability of their pretenses.  The Phantom of Liberty, with its seemingly plotless sequence of comic sketches, and That Obscure Object of Desire, with its subplot of terrorist explosions providing the backdrop for a tale of sabotaged seduction, associate clearly with the maestro’s earliest films in their defiance of narrative convention while revealing a sweetness of tone and luscious sense of color unavailable to the youthful illusion smasher. 

A child of the bourgeoisie himself, Buñuel reserved his most elegant and engagingly devastating portraits for the class he knew best.  The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie are undoubtedly among the most bizarre and insightful dissections of polite society ever performed.  Both explore, in radically original fashion, the myriad difficulties involved in throwing a successful dinner party.  The protagonists in The Discreet Charm, perpetually thwarted in their pursuit of something to eat, respond to the most ludicrous and outrageous turns of events with a genteel poise that borders on buffoonery—but they really are charming!  In Angel, the makeshift civilization set up by the guests in the spacious salon from which there is no exit resembles a wilderness expedition stranded in fiercely inhospitable terrain.  It is indeed weird, Buñuel implies, to be stuck in the company of socialites.  While most of Buñuel’s jokes are in the tradition of the non sequitur, avid imagery analysts and symbol hunters can feast their interpretive brains on select passages from virtually any of his films.  One inquisitive critic approached Buñuel’s son and assistant, Juan Luis, to ask about the significance of the bear that suddenly appears on the staircase of the elegant mansion in The Exterminating Angel.  The young Buñuel replied, “My father likes bears.”

Buñuel lived a quiet, quasi-reclusive life, mostly in Mexico City.  He was a meticulous gentleman of regular habits, which included the cleaning and polishing of his extensive collection of antique firearms.  He seldom went to the movies.  His own films, looked at again through the depth of additional years, continue to reveal more layers of amazement and compassion and subtle wit than one or two viewings could suggest. 

For the sake of people puzzled by his work—or flabbergasted by the relentless irreverence with which he treated organized religion and its agents—Buñuel explained himself twenty years before his departure: “People always want an explanation for everything.  It’s the result of centuries of bourgeois education.  And for everything without an explanation they resort finally to God.  But what good does it do them?  After that they’d have to explain God.  

“Look: if my best friend, dead many years, were to appear and touch me on the ear and my ear caught fire, just like that, I wouldn’t believe he came from hell; it wouldn’t make me believe in God, nor in the Immaculate Conception, nor that the Virgin could help me pass my exams.  I’d simply think: Luis, here’s one more mystery you’ll never understand.”