Craig J. Clark
In his autobiography My Last Sigh (published one year before he drew his final breath in 1983), Luis Buñuel recounted with some amusement the scandal that erupted around his Academy Award nominations for 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Tracked down by some Mexican journalists and asked if he thought he was going to win, Buñuel replied, “Of course. I’ve already paid the twenty-five thousand dollars they wanted. Americans may have their weaknesses, but they do keep their promises.” When headlines appeared in Mexico City papers to the effect that he had “bought the Oscar,” feathers were ruffled that had to be smoothed over by his producer, Serge Silberman, but anybody familiar with Buñuel’s ironic sense of humor would have known he was joking. The punchline, of course, was it actually did win Best Foreign Language Film, which Silberman gratefully accepted.
At the time, Buñuel and his frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière (who were also nominated for their screenplay) were hard at work on a follow-up, which emerged as Le Fantôme de la liberté, a.k.a. The Phantom of Liberty, when it debuted in France on September 11, 1974. Their fruitful association stretched back one decade to 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid, based on the novel by Octave Mirbeau and also produced by Silberman. This was followed by two more adaptations – The Monk (unfilmed by Buñuel) and Belle de Jour (made in 1967) – and a trio of originals starting with the religion-skewering The Milky Way, about a pair of tramps on a pilgrimage who encounter curious characters and strange sights along the way. Discreet Charm tripled the protagonists, but stayed with the same core group as they repeatedly failed to accomplish the seemingly simple task of sitting down to a meal together.
While Discreet Charm eventually gives itself over to flights of fantasy and dreams within dreams, The Phantom of Liberty breaks with narrative convention right from the start, centering on a group of characters for a handful of scenes until one peels off, prompting Buñuel and Carrière to abandon the first plot and start one anew, only to repeat the process a scene or two later. This is best illustrated by the sequence that starts with a couple being taken aback by a set of scandalous pictures their daughter was given by a stranger in the park. That these turn out to be ordinary postcards depicting Paris landmarks is one of many clever reversals in the film. (“Disgusting, but what can you do?” the father asks. Fire the negligent nanny for a start.)
That night, the father receives several strange nocturnal visitations, which he is in the process of describing to a doctor when his nurse interrupts them to ask for leave to visit an ailing relative. When the door shuts on the patient, he’s never seen again, and the film stays with the nurse when she’s forced to stop for the night at an inn where she’s one of a number of stranded travelers. When she continues on her way the next morning, she gains a passenger in need of a lift into town to the police academy where he teaches. After the nurse drops him off, she’s the one who’s never seen again. Whether she made it home while her father was still kicking is of no interest to Buñuel and Carrière – or anyone else, for that matter. The seemingly random chain of events is shown to be more purposeful than it is on first glance thanks to the occasional rhymes and callbacks peppered throughout the script.
As the film progresses, every scene turns on a surrealist twist, some more broadly comedic than others. Buñuel gets in his requisite dig at organized religion by having four monks visit the nurse’s room to pray, then switch to playing cards with religious objects as the stakes. For his part, the teacher is dismayed by the unruly schoolboy behavior of his adult students, who pay little attention to his lecture about society’s changing morals. (To illustrate this, he tells them about an unusual social gathering that is one of the film’s highlights and is best left unspoiled.)
Typical of Buñuel’s films of this period, a top-flight international cast (including Monica Vitti, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean Rochefort, Michael Lonsdale, and Michel Piccoli) was assembled to bring his surreal provocations to life. That they continue to shock and amuse today is a testament to the care with which they were conceived and carried out. (It also helps that the film is riotously funny.) In addition, The Phantom of Liberty served as an inspiration for Richard Linklater’s Slacker, which borrowed its structure, but not its jaundiced view of humanity. That’s the difference between the kind of film a director makes at the start of their career and at its end. Buñuel had one more trick up his sleeve, however: the aptly titled That Obscure Object of Desire, which also garnered Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film and its screenplay, but went home empty-handed. The check must not have cleared.
“The Phantom of Liberty” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
