Three Films by Luis Buñuel
Details by Film
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Streaming Options
The Phantom of Liberty
Streaming Options
That Obscure Object of Desire
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to a dinner that is continually delayed, their attempts to eat thwarted by vaudevillian events both actual and imagined, including terrorist attacks, military maneuvers, and ghostly apparitions. Stringing together a discontinuous, digressive series of absurdist set pieces, Buñuel and his screenwriting partner Jean-Claude Carrière send a cast of European-film greats—including Fernando Rey, Stéphane Audran, Delphine Seyrig, and Jean-Pierre Cassel—through a maze of desire deferred, frustrated, and interrupted. The Oscar-winning pinnacle of Buñuel’s late-career ascent as a feted maestro of the international art house, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is also one of his most gleefully radical assaults on the values of the ruling class.
The Phantom of Liberty
Luis Buñuel’s vision of the inherent absurdity of human social rituals reaches its taboo-annihilating extreme in what may be his most morally subversive and formally audacious work. Zigzagging across time and space, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, The Phantom of Liberty unfolds as a picaresque, its main character traveling between tableaux in a series of Dadaist non sequiturs. Unbound by the laws of narrative logic, Buñuel lets his surrealist’s id run riot in an exuberant revolt against bourgeois rationality that seems telegraphed directly from his unconscious to the screen.
That Obscure Object of Desire
Luis Buñuel’s final film brings 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 flair, Buñuel uses two different actors in the latter role—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from the surrealist favorite Pierre Louÿs’s classic erotic novel La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898), That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harks back to Buñuel’s avant-garde beginnings.
Release Information:
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- The Castaway of Providence Street (El náufrago de la calle Providencia), a 1971 homage to Luis Buñuel made by his longtime friends and fellow filmmakers Arturo Ripstein and Rafael Castanedo
- Interview from 2000 with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere
- Interview from 2000 with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere
- Speaking of Buñuel (A propósito de Buñuel), a documentary from 2000 on Buñuel’s life and work
- Analysis of The Phantom of Liberty from 2017 by film scholar Peter William Evans
- Lady Doubles, a 2017 documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, who share the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire
- Essays by critic Adrian Martin and novelist and critic Gary Indiana, along with interviews with Luis Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent
- Once Upon a Time: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” a 2011 television program about the making of the film
- Portrait of an Impatient Filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, a 2012 short documentary featuring director of photography Edmond Richard and assistant director Pierre Lary
- Episode of the French television program Pour le cinéma from 1974 featuring actors Michel Piccoli and Jean-Claude Brialy
- Excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent film La femme et le pantin, an adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel of the same name, on which That Obscure Object of Desire is also based
- Episode of the French television program Pour le cinéma from 1972 that features behind-the-scenes footage of Luis Buñuel on set, along with interviews with the director and actors Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Bulle Ogier, Fernando Rey, and Delphine Seyrig
- Episode of the French television program Le dernier des cinq from 1974 featuring Jean-Claude Brialy
- Trailer
- Documentary from 1985 about producer Serge Silberman, who worked with Buñuel on five of his final seven films
- Episode of the Belgian television program Le monde du cinéma from 1977, featuring Jean-Claude Carriere, actor Fernando Rey, and producer Serge Silberman
- Trailer
- Conversation from 1977 among many of Buñuel’s collaborators, including Jean-Claude Carriere, Fernando Rey, and actors Julien Bertheau, Muni, and Michel Piccoli
- Trailer