Luis Bunuel

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Classic DVD: The Phantom Of Liberty (1974)

August 20, 2010 in Film | Permalink

The bathroom habits of well-to-do people was a recurring theme in Luis Buñuel's work.

Utter financial freedom can sometimes be a dangerous thing for an artist, especially one as aggressively experimental as Luis Buñuel, but the capital the director had at his disposal after the commercial triumph of 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie wasn’t wasted on the admittedly uneven but often brilliant The Phantom of Liberty. The film is a series of glancingly connected, mind-fucking, taboo-busting vignettes that look at humanity and see only meanness, coarseness and hypocrisy.

Among the movie’s best sequences are a scene in which a group of refined people arrive at a well-appointed home, ostensibly for a dinner party, but are seated on toilet bowls that have been arranged around a dining room table. They engage in polite conversation as they relieve themselves. The partiers subsequently repair individually to a bathroom-sized room to eat meals, taking their nourishment in private, so as not to disgust each other with the repulsive smell of food. Another well-executed passage has parents frantic about the shocking disappearance of their young daughter, who happens to be standing right in front of them the whole time.

Not each of the pieces works as well as these two segments, but Buñuel’s disgust with our attempts to cover up our primal baseness with propriety hovers over the entire film. He knew that our ability to pretend we’re polite creatures often allows us to commit the most impolite acts. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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