LE FANTOME DE LA LIBERTÉ (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974) ***1/2 Luis Buñuel covers a lot of ground in his films, logistically in this one by storyline leaping from one character to another, generally when they come into contact with each other but as usual he observes no hard and fast rules. He lingers on our taboos and vanities, then desires and fears, finally settling on slogans and perspectives and absurdities. Protestors shouting "Down With Liberty!" could have been damn near anyone as far as Henry Kissinger or Dick Nixon were concerned. There's a great deal of danger in over-analyzing any of this, it squeezes the magic out, but let's just look at the dinner guests sitting on the toilet scene/and then going down the hall to sit alone in the dinner room. Much is made of the mass of merde that will be created by the population explosion-are we not creating that mess together, and are not our sacred moments of sensual enjoyment in private? Or the young man running off with his aunt for his sexual initiation: "What is wrong," Buñuel asks without discernible wink, "with his doing it with someone he loves, and who has known him his entire life? Why is intimacy more respectable with more recent acquaintances who would know him less?" I'm with those who answer "If you don't know, you ain't gonna get it anyway," but it is also true that Buñuel delights in being unnecessarily provocative, the sophistry of the isolated senses, or of only the five senses as he maintains a strong sense of magic throughout, including telephone calls from the other side. In fact Buñuel can be iconoclastic through mere piety, juxtoposition is less his craft than a natural continuity of existence beyond recognized boundaries, therefore certain to offend at some point. There will always be an offended indivual, so long as another individual continues to relentlessly explore in accordance with his own edicts. Respectable is not a definition or encompassing attribute of anything, not so far as Buñuel can tell. Except for maybe ostriches, which appear to be part of an insomniac's evolutionary progression beyond postmen.
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