The Phantom of Liberty

Screenwriter Jean Claude Carriere may provide a video introduction to this anarchic late work of director Luis Bunuel -- the second to last film he would make in the almost fifty year career that began with 1928's Un Chien Andalou -- but I don't think even he can give a really adequate explanation of this hysterical headscratcher. While most of the masterpieces of Bunuel's later career had a cohesive theme or situation (the quixotic attempt to finish a meal, the route of a pilgrimage first undertaken during the crusades), The Phantom of Liberty isn't really bound by a narrative arc.

In that sense, it might very well be the last gasp of the stream-of-consciousness style that marked Bunuel's early films. Unlike Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'or, however, this film has the added curiosity of a cast that included some of Europe's most respected stars (Jean Rochefort, Jean-Claude Brialy, and Antonioni muse Monica Vitti), alongside a sea of Bunuel regulars like Muni.

In this film, one skit leads into another. We open on one of Goya's canvases and dissolve to a live-action recreation of the same scene, over which the voice of Muni takes us to the present (Europe in the 70s), as she reads about the events aloud from a book. A man that appears to be some kind of a pervert in the park passes some photographs to a young girl. The photos, which repulse her parents to no end, are of various architectural wonders, mutated by Bunuel's surrealist eye into something vaguely suggestive. And that's just the first ten minutes.

Criterion provides a beautiful transfer of a film that I'd only previously seen on bootlegged videotapes or ancient, wrinkled rental copies. But this is Criterion, of course, so that's par for the course. As I said before, don't expect any of the extras to give you any answers to the film's questions. We get interview excerpts from the late Mr. Bunuel and an essay by Gary Indiana that makes a noble attempt to explain a movie for which rational explanation is beside the point.

But fans of Monty Python and Mr. Show should get into this film right away. It may not always go for laughs, though the movie provides plenty of those, and might veer into some creepy directions but so did those two TV shows in some of their best moments. But if you take their "this makes no sense and yet it somehow does make sense" structure and compare it to Bunuel, you'd find they have quite a few things in common.

And if you're watching a film that involves people eating heavy meals while sitting on toilets, rational story structure really isn't that important. -- Christopher Hyatt