Orderly Chaos

By Frank Rich

THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

Directed by Luis Bunuel

Screenplay by Luis Bunuel with

Jean-Claude Carriere

Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is an elegant middle-aged Spaniard who likes brandy and cigars, expensive suits and an occasional pretty woman. He is an unflappable sort--but since he is the hero of a Luis Bunuel film, his poise is soon put to extraordinary tests. Terrorists, for no discernible reason, begin to blow up cars in his tranquil Seville neighborhood. A waiter at his favorite restaurant serves him a martini containing a huge fly. His butler, ordinarily a paragon of civility, starts to give him Up. Somehow Mathieu remains untouched by all these shenanigans, but then he falls in love with Conchita, a ravishing young virgin. Though Conchita professes to adore Mathieu with an ardor equal to his own, she will not go to bed with him--and will not say why. Such torture is more than even Mathieu can take: slowly he surrenders to the chaos that presses in on his life from every side.

That Obscure Object of Desire is Bunuel's free-flowing meditation on Mathieu's fall from bourgeois grace, and like so many films by this great surrealist director, it is art of the most subversive kind. Bunuel wants the audience to see the world as he ultimately forces Mathieu to see it--as an irrational state where logic is a worthless tool. In Obscure Object the director never bothers to explain Conchita's stubborn celibacy or any of his story's other absurdities, for he does not believe that any explanations exist. In Bunuel's view, life's visible events are random and misleading; the sooner we learn to accept the meaninglessness of reality, the sooner we will begin to understand the buried psychological truths that reality tends to disguise.

This is why, in Obscure Object, Bunuel pulls the fiendish stunt of casting two actresses as Conchita, and then proceeds to interchange them at whim. It is his way of saying that the movie's subject is Mathieu's obsessive desire rather than the 'obscure object" that brings it about. There are many other rude jokes as well, all designed to pull the rug out from under civilization as we know it. Bunuel casts a dwarf as a professor of psychology and dreams up a clerical terrorist group called the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. When the two Conchitas implore Mathieu to respect their virginity, they are sometimes dressed in racy undergarments that even Frederick's of Hollywood might consider too much.

For all the anarchy of Bu@#241;uel's vision, there is nothing chaotic about his filmmaking style. At 77, he is in such fluid touch with his 'medium that he seems incapable of staging an awkward shot. The movie appears to flow directly from his subconscious, just as surrealist art is meant to do. Fernando Rey, a veteran of a decade of Bunuel films, finds as much baroque humor in his many bouts with coitus interruptus as he did in the unfinished eating scenes of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The two mysterious Conchitas -- one svelte (Carole Bouquet), the other voluptuous (Angela Molina) -- are impossibly erotic.

If Obscure Object is not quite as good as Discreet Charm (1972) and Tristana (1969), the two Bunuel masterpieces it most resembles, the problem is one of tone. The new film opens on a note of antic humor only to turn, in the second half, unrelievedly grave: as Mathieu and Conchita's relationship lapses into sadomasochistic games, Bunuel's irony gives way to a surprising display of personal despair. The sudden shift in mood does not work, but it is forgivable. Having given his life to one of the century's great artistic revolutions, Luis Bunuel has earned the right to show his wounds .

-- Frank Rich

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