Cinematographic Subjects
Bunuel’s surrealistic cinema and his strange masculine and feminine portraits
Bunuel employed originality, irony, an iconoclastic attitude and the opposition to the taboos of his era in expressing the quest for love of the surrealist artists. Within this love, the great director had the chance to express the odd quest of erotic desire, the mysterious labyrinths it crosses in order to reach its goal, its obscure and distant object. The title of Bunuel’s film That obscure object of desire (1977) expresses the idea of the indecipherable, mystical and half-hidden nature of erotic desire. This is the main logic of the film, of the development of its narrative and characters. Particularly important is the enigmatic character of the erotic relationship, whose inner essence remains hidden and gets only partially revealed later on only to be confronted with and refuted by new incidents. This perspective is present in the way the persona of the heroine is constructed: The female part is performed by two different actresses (Angela Molina and Carol Bouquet) although its one and only. The man in the myth fantasizes this part in a different way each time, from two perspectives and with two or more characters.
In the obscure object of desire the woman has turned the middle-aged Mateo into a puppet. She plays with his desire sadistically. Her true psychosexual identity is covered by impenetrable mystery. The director enhances this mystery by using two actresses for the same female part. Since we are looking at the story from Mateo’s viewpoint, the double realization of Conchita corresponds to the hero’s split inner world. The double identity of Conchita belongs to the surrealistic, beyond logic, ideas of Bunuel who won’t stop (not ever for a single moment) playing with our rationalism and credulity in this film. Conchita will surrender to Mateo on one instance, repel him on the other. She kisses him, she strips him naked, she turns him on, and then she turns him away. She surrenders to him in his country house, but at the same moment she wears a tight chastity belt that Don Mateo cannot loose. Naked, she hugs a young man in front of his eyes and on the next day she claims, with tears in her eyes, that she was just pretending and that she remains a virgin. In other words, Mateo’s erotic object of desire keeps offering itself and then withdrawing. Finally, it remains distant, obscure and inaccessible. Approaching may be just an illusion. We can never be sure whether Conchita sees Mateo as a lover or as a father. As a victim of her sadism, as a fidget or just a rich man to take advantage of. Bunuel makes us wonder all the time: is she really a virgin or a pervert? A cold woman or a sadist? Does she have another lover and make a fool of Mateo? Does she abhor him, in the end, because he’s just a jealous old man or does she really love him? We’ll never find out.
After Don Jaime in Viridiana and Don Lope in Tristana, Don Mateo completes the trilogy of paternalistic desires of the liberal and scabrous old bourgeois for the young girl who is characterized by primitiveness and innocence – a trilogy featuring Fernando Ray.
In Tristana (1970) we are wondering what the heroine wants. Her quests follow a crooked line. Tristana returns, goes back and forth, destroys. Does she want old Don Lope or the young painter? The young erotic vigorousness or the tenderness of the old? The substitute of father love and the incest or sex? Or is she rather lured by the close embrace and despotism of Don Lope? Or the lethal battle against men who ends with her dominance? Is she, deep inside, searching for revenge, for the death of her “guardian”? Or could it be that her entire route is just the completion of her corruption, her conversion to immorality, by Don Lope? By murdering Don Lope, she shows that she has totally mastered the corruption that he taught her. Could it rather be that the purpose of her route was the ultimate escape, the return to the lost past, the fantasy and her craziness that surpasses reality? Questions cross each other, enforce each other or cancel each other, the lack of an answer keeps changing places in the film, depending on our reading, and empowers this film which keeps changing guises and projecting different lines of meaning.
The duet Don Lope (Fernando Ray) and Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is presented from the beginning as a relationship between guardian (father) and daughter. They are connected by an unbreakable relationship – substitute of the Oedipus complex. A hidden incest relation will shortly be developed.
Don Lope is mature man falling in love for the young protégé Tristana (daughter of an old lover of his). He protects the poor and the weak, he detests the commercial spirit and financial dependencies, he despises the newspapers and the church. He is a womanizer, an amoralist (as far as love is concerned) and an atheist, a kind of anarchist aristocrat, in short an open-minded and nice fine old man.
As the narrative unfolds, his acts contradict more and more his progressive, immoralist theories. His manic desire for Tristana makes him bossy. He, who ridiculed marriage and family, manages to marry her after a while and ends up banqueting with priests! In retrospect we realize that, due to the oedipodian character of the Don Lope-Tristana relationship, in the narrative Don Lope represents the Law, the paternalistic Law, and plays the part of the castrating father. The Don Lope-Tristana relationship is, therefore, marked by castration. Tristana, although she makes her father her own, is condemned to castration, symbolic and actual (amputation of her leg). Tristana works in different but interconnected levels: libidinous-psychological, financial, political and moral.
In Belle de jour (1996) we find two exemplary images as to the encryption of the meaning of the sexual relationship and the creation of seductive mystery and ambiguity. The big asian customer of the brothel, before having sex with the heroin, shows her two weird, not common-use objects: a little bell, which he rings next to the woman’s face, and a box from within which some weird noises are spread from unseen sources. Are they insects? Snakes? The asian talks and probably explains, but his tongue is unknown to us, incomprehensible. The heroin checks the content of the box and refuses. Do those, unexplained, to us, images provide the stimulus, are they something strange and obscure, do they refer to sex? The director keeps them out of the viewer’s reach. That’s why they function as an invisible, barely comprehensible stimulus. What do they mean? Is it a strange erotic game? Some asian perversion? Is it a proposal for some orgy or are we just dealing with a small passing incident? Bunuel ingeniously hides the object of desire and stimulates our fantasies.
Severine (Catherine Deneuve) in Belle de jour is a split personality, one with two lives. The first is that of the decent, burgeois wife and the other is that of the prostitute, who offers her body to any client, handsome or ugly. The wife treats with sexual coldness her husband, the doctor who offers her comforts and safety. Her cold, swamped love life in her marital house is completed by her masochistic sexual fantasies, which extend to her humiliating life as a prostitute. Bunuel composes Belle de jour as a continuous succession of the present, the fantasy and the recollection in a way that breaks their boundaries. The experienced action (the reality), the dream and the imagination are confused with each other in a wise way: Severine’s fantasy, which we watch as current action, gets abruptly intercepted, and only then do we realize that we have been watching her fantasies. Another example: the couch in Severine’s masochistic fantasy is the same as the couch in which, in a couple of days, the necrophilist aristocrat comes to meet her in “reality”. The confusion between reality and dream gets covered with mystery and makes her inner world look ambiguous. The end, with successive changes and transitions from one level to the other, becomes totally ambiguous.
What we can understand is that Severine’s masochistic prostitution brings her nearer her balanced husband. Perhaps this happens because the “economy” of her inner world and its balance can only be restored through some strong doses of masochistic experience. Severine’s sould needs carnal masochism, which will enable her to lead a better family, decent life. In prostitution she spends her death urges, her suicidal desires, which she needs to vest in order to balance between the rule of pleasure and the rule of reality. When her husband gets shot –by the only man who gave her pleasure– and remains invalid, we can feel that Severin, mourning and dressed in black, in the role of the devoted and guilty nurse, feels better. She looks better fitted for self-abandonment, persistence, humble life without satisfaction, love or expectations. Could it be that mourning helps the urges of death come to surface and be recognized, so that some balance between the urges of death and the urges of life is achieved? As she tells her immobilized husband, her fantasies have stopped.
This film reveals, once more, the unexplored depths of the soul and meaning of Bunuel’s work. All Bunuel’s films are covered by the haze and mystery of his poetic and surrealistic fantasy. In many films, the viewer has a hard time to understand where and how the erotic desires of the characters meet. Bunuel confuses us even more with his weird surrealistic visions.
In El (1952) we cannot understand why the beautiful Gloria tolerates the monomaniac, selfish, full of complexes and choleric Francisco, whom she has made the mistake to marry. They meet in the church when, in a brilliantly weird ceremony, Francisco mentally connects the clean bare feet that the priest kisses to the beautiful foot of pious Gloria. The shift of Francisco’s gaze and fetishism is enough to set fire on their love at first sight. Bunuel reveals his cards and surprises us, with awesome black humour, in the scene of their wedding night in the wagon-lit, and continues by bringing Francisco’s jealousy to its extremes, in a sarcastic and surrealist spirit. The director accumulates the most improbable of coincidences that dig the poor man’s grave. These coincidences justify Francisco maniac and paranoid jealousy. In El, Bunuel composes with sympathy the portrait of a pervert and impotent man, as he does in The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) and Viridiana. Francisco in El is a puritan, religiose, repressed and virgin. His oppressiveness, due to his paranoid jealousy, becomes sadism in its purest form: He incarcerates his wife Gloria and ties her on the bed, he wants to sew up her pudendum for safety reasons. He treats her violently. How do the erotic desires of Francisco and Gloria meet in El? Perhaps the landlord’s sadism attracts some latent, hidden masochism in Gloria. His self-possession, his imposing presence and his certainty magnetize her. His sick violence makes her passive. She endures him, exceeding the limits of normal tolerance.
In The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, in El, in Viridiana and in The diary of a chambermaid, the mature pervert has plunged in his fetishism and fixation. Sexual act and love are beyond him. He cannot fulfill his erotic desires. Impotence crashes such men psychologically. Archibaldo, the sadist, cannot even kill the women he sneaks up on, thereby substituting the erotic act for murder. The mature lovesick pervert in Bunuel’s films has always the same look: oval face, thin moustache, nobility and politeness that cover the violence of his passion. The magnificent Fernando Ray, full of lordiness and grace, is the typical example for such a character.
Don Jaime (Fernando Ray) in Viridiana (1961) missed the chance to made love with his wife, because she died on their wedding night. Since that night he obsessively repeats the same ritual, dressed as a bride himself or by dressing his young niece Viridiana as a bride (Silvia Pinal). Don Mateo (Fernando Ray) is masochistically found in the same position (of abstention from sex) in The obscure object of desire, because the young girl that he has fallen in love with systematically drives him back, thereby tormenting him. Perhaps the common characteristic of Gloria, Viridiana and –most of all– Severin in Belle de jour is their repressed masochism. The cold, religiose and utopian Viridiana wants to do good. In exchange she only gets masculine violence on her nice body, i.e. two rape attempts. Gloria (El), the Belle de jour, Viridiana and the heroines of The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, all become the quarry of men and become their victims, because they are led there by their latent masochism. In Bunuel’s pantheon, though, we also find expansionist females, who disturb the moral order and the masculine law. Susana, of the 1950 Mexican film under the same title, and Celestine (Jeanne Moreau) in The diary of a chambermaid (1963) intrude as maids in rich bourgeois houses in the countryside. With the eroticism they spread about they disturb the balance of the sodden urges of men as well as the conservative state of things. The diary of a chambermaid is Bunuel’s first French film. Bunuel adapted Marimbaud’s novel under the same title, making considerable changes to it. The most important change was the fact that Bunuel shifted the action from the end of the 19th century to 1930, the era of the rise of right-wing extremists in France. His political goal was to deal with the chauvinist and reactionary right wing supporters.
The diary of a chambermaid begins with the advent of the beautiful chambermaid Celestine from Paris. Bunuel describes the provincial burgeois family as a relic of the state of affairs of the old landlords, a mish-mash of catholics, reactionaries, decadent and ridiculous. Bunuel’s mural includes both the bosses and the servants, everyone deep in the same reactionary, right-wing ideas. This is a microcosmos of self-indulgent, decadent and conservative persons. The director, once again, deals with the deceptive harmony of the burgeoise class through the problematic burgeois family. He delineates in detail, from a social and political point of view, the characters, also dealing with their love life. Therefore, Bunuel’s approach is addressing issues of sexual policy. This is, then, a film of sociopolitical thought, that mainly addresses the private life of reactionaries.
The presence of Celestine, the chambermaid, in place and in the development of the narrative is catalytic. Immediately she becomes the center of the appetence of every man in the villa: of the hungry for sex and unsatisfied, deprived husband (Micel Piccoli), who cannot make love to his decent, religious and cold wife; as a consequence, he turns to bird and animal hunting and to chambermaids, ugly or beautiful, whom she treats to pointless gabble, in order to drive into a corner in the stables.
Celestin, similarly, is approached by the pervert, old father of the lady of the house. This old man, in turn, seeks the satisfaction of his sexual desires. The capricious old man reminds us of the other middle-aged and over-aged perverts of Bunuel. Fetishist, like Archibaldo de la Cruz or Don Jaime in Viridiana, he lives with an obsession that reminds us of that of Francisco in El: the feet of the maids and the boots with which he dresses them. As the hero in The obscure object of desire, he suffers from intense masochism. He cleans and polishes the maids’ shoes in order to be humiliated, in order to become inferior even to the most dirty part of the lowermost people in the hierarchy in the house (see George Battaille). Not able to cope anymore with the tension of his fetishist passion, he suffers a heart attack while keeping Celestin’s beloved boots tight against him. Bunuel sketches the noble and polite old man with sympathy, in spite of the fact that he casts such a decadent temperament upon him. The old man accepts the claim of Huysmans, the author, that the dominant social classes cannot be respectable. His perversions are painless to the others, it’s only him they turn against and they lead him to self-destruction.
On the contrary, the perversions of the fascist caretaker, Josef, are dangerous for the people that surround him. He is depraved of sex, puritan (he accepts making love with Celestin only after he is promised that they will marry), and filled in violent, incontrollable compulsions (he kills the hens in the farm slowly and sadistically) His compulsions find a way out in political, fascist violent, as well as in sexual violence, and more particularly in the rape and murder of a little girl in the woods. Bunuel, by attacking this sordid and reactionary character, scoffs as his beliefs in order, the army and religion, in a real surrealist and seditious spirit.
Th. Soumas
In the obscure object of desire the woman has turned the middle-aged Mateo into a puppet. She plays with his desire sadistically. Her true psychosexual identity is covered by impenetrable mystery. The director enhances this mystery by using two actresses for the same female part. Since we are looking at the story from Mateo’s viewpoint, the double realization of Conchita corresponds to the hero’s split inner world. The double identity of Conchita belongs to the surrealistic, beyond logic, ideas of Bunuel who won’t stop (not ever for a single moment) playing with our rationalism and credulity in this film. Conchita will surrender to Mateo on one instance, repel him on the other. She kisses him, she strips him naked, she turns him on, and then she turns him away. She surrenders to him in his country house, but at the same moment she wears a tight chastity belt that Don Mateo cannot loose. Naked, she hugs a young man in front of his eyes and on the next day she claims, with tears in her eyes, that she was just pretending and that she remains a virgin. In other words, Mateo’s erotic object of desire keeps offering itself and then withdrawing. Finally, it remains distant, obscure and inaccessible. Approaching may be just an illusion. We can never be sure whether Conchita sees Mateo as a lover or as a father. As a victim of her sadism, as a fidget or just a rich man to take advantage of. Bunuel makes us wonder all the time: is she really a virgin or a pervert? A cold woman or a sadist? Does she have another lover and make a fool of Mateo? Does she abhor him, in the end, because he’s just a jealous old man or does she really love him? We’ll never find out.
After Don Jaime in Viridiana and Don Lope in Tristana, Don Mateo completes the trilogy of paternalistic desires of the liberal and scabrous old bourgeois for the young girl who is characterized by primitiveness and innocence – a trilogy featuring Fernando Ray.
In Tristana (1970) we are wondering what the heroine wants. Her quests follow a crooked line. Tristana returns, goes back and forth, destroys. Does she want old Don Lope or the young painter? The young erotic vigorousness or the tenderness of the old? The substitute of father love and the incest or sex? Or is she rather lured by the close embrace and despotism of Don Lope? Or the lethal battle against men who ends with her dominance? Is she, deep inside, searching for revenge, for the death of her “guardian”? Or could it be that her entire route is just the completion of her corruption, her conversion to immorality, by Don Lope? By murdering Don Lope, she shows that she has totally mastered the corruption that he taught her. Could it rather be that the purpose of her route was the ultimate escape, the return to the lost past, the fantasy and her craziness that surpasses reality? Questions cross each other, enforce each other or cancel each other, the lack of an answer keeps changing places in the film, depending on our reading, and empowers this film which keeps changing guises and projecting different lines of meaning.
The duet Don Lope (Fernando Ray) and Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) is presented from the beginning as a relationship between guardian (father) and daughter. They are connected by an unbreakable relationship – substitute of the Oedipus complex. A hidden incest relation will shortly be developed.
Don Lope is mature man falling in love for the young protégé Tristana (daughter of an old lover of his). He protects the poor and the weak, he detests the commercial spirit and financial dependencies, he despises the newspapers and the church. He is a womanizer, an amoralist (as far as love is concerned) and an atheist, a kind of anarchist aristocrat, in short an open-minded and nice fine old man.
As the narrative unfolds, his acts contradict more and more his progressive, immoralist theories. His manic desire for Tristana makes him bossy. He, who ridiculed marriage and family, manages to marry her after a while and ends up banqueting with priests! In retrospect we realize that, due to the oedipodian character of the Don Lope-Tristana relationship, in the narrative Don Lope represents the Law, the paternalistic Law, and plays the part of the castrating father. The Don Lope-Tristana relationship is, therefore, marked by castration. Tristana, although she makes her father her own, is condemned to castration, symbolic and actual (amputation of her leg). Tristana works in different but interconnected levels: libidinous-psychological, financial, political and moral.
In Belle de jour (1996) we find two exemplary images as to the encryption of the meaning of the sexual relationship and the creation of seductive mystery and ambiguity. The big asian customer of the brothel, before having sex with the heroin, shows her two weird, not common-use objects: a little bell, which he rings next to the woman’s face, and a box from within which some weird noises are spread from unseen sources. Are they insects? Snakes? The asian talks and probably explains, but his tongue is unknown to us, incomprehensible. The heroin checks the content of the box and refuses. Do those, unexplained, to us, images provide the stimulus, are they something strange and obscure, do they refer to sex? The director keeps them out of the viewer’s reach. That’s why they function as an invisible, barely comprehensible stimulus. What do they mean? Is it a strange erotic game? Some asian perversion? Is it a proposal for some orgy or are we just dealing with a small passing incident? Bunuel ingeniously hides the object of desire and stimulates our fantasies.
Severine (Catherine Deneuve) in Belle de jour is a split personality, one with two lives. The first is that of the decent, burgeois wife and the other is that of the prostitute, who offers her body to any client, handsome or ugly. The wife treats with sexual coldness her husband, the doctor who offers her comforts and safety. Her cold, swamped love life in her marital house is completed by her masochistic sexual fantasies, which extend to her humiliating life as a prostitute. Bunuel composes Belle de jour as a continuous succession of the present, the fantasy and the recollection in a way that breaks their boundaries. The experienced action (the reality), the dream and the imagination are confused with each other in a wise way: Severine’s fantasy, which we watch as current action, gets abruptly intercepted, and only then do we realize that we have been watching her fantasies. Another example: the couch in Severine’s masochistic fantasy is the same as the couch in which, in a couple of days, the necrophilist aristocrat comes to meet her in “reality”. The confusion between reality and dream gets covered with mystery and makes her inner world look ambiguous. The end, with successive changes and transitions from one level to the other, becomes totally ambiguous.
What we can understand is that Severine’s masochistic prostitution brings her nearer her balanced husband. Perhaps this happens because the “economy” of her inner world and its balance can only be restored through some strong doses of masochistic experience. Severine’s sould needs carnal masochism, which will enable her to lead a better family, decent life. In prostitution she spends her death urges, her suicidal desires, which she needs to vest in order to balance between the rule of pleasure and the rule of reality. When her husband gets shot –by the only man who gave her pleasure– and remains invalid, we can feel that Severin, mourning and dressed in black, in the role of the devoted and guilty nurse, feels better. She looks better fitted for self-abandonment, persistence, humble life without satisfaction, love or expectations. Could it be that mourning helps the urges of death come to surface and be recognized, so that some balance between the urges of death and the urges of life is achieved? As she tells her immobilized husband, her fantasies have stopped.
This film reveals, once more, the unexplored depths of the soul and meaning of Bunuel’s work. All Bunuel’s films are covered by the haze and mystery of his poetic and surrealistic fantasy. In many films, the viewer has a hard time to understand where and how the erotic desires of the characters meet. Bunuel confuses us even more with his weird surrealistic visions.
In El (1952) we cannot understand why the beautiful Gloria tolerates the monomaniac, selfish, full of complexes and choleric Francisco, whom she has made the mistake to marry. They meet in the church when, in a brilliantly weird ceremony, Francisco mentally connects the clean bare feet that the priest kisses to the beautiful foot of pious Gloria. The shift of Francisco’s gaze and fetishism is enough to set fire on their love at first sight. Bunuel reveals his cards and surprises us, with awesome black humour, in the scene of their wedding night in the wagon-lit, and continues by bringing Francisco’s jealousy to its extremes, in a sarcastic and surrealist spirit. The director accumulates the most improbable of coincidences that dig the poor man’s grave. These coincidences justify Francisco maniac and paranoid jealousy. In El, Bunuel composes with sympathy the portrait of a pervert and impotent man, as he does in The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) and Viridiana. Francisco in El is a puritan, religiose, repressed and virgin. His oppressiveness, due to his paranoid jealousy, becomes sadism in its purest form: He incarcerates his wife Gloria and ties her on the bed, he wants to sew up her pudendum for safety reasons. He treats her violently. How do the erotic desires of Francisco and Gloria meet in El? Perhaps the landlord’s sadism attracts some latent, hidden masochism in Gloria. His self-possession, his imposing presence and his certainty magnetize her. His sick violence makes her passive. She endures him, exceeding the limits of normal tolerance.
In The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, in El, in Viridiana and in The diary of a chambermaid, the mature pervert has plunged in his fetishism and fixation. Sexual act and love are beyond him. He cannot fulfill his erotic desires. Impotence crashes such men psychologically. Archibaldo, the sadist, cannot even kill the women he sneaks up on, thereby substituting the erotic act for murder. The mature lovesick pervert in Bunuel’s films has always the same look: oval face, thin moustache, nobility and politeness that cover the violence of his passion. The magnificent Fernando Ray, full of lordiness and grace, is the typical example for such a character.
Don Jaime (Fernando Ray) in Viridiana (1961) missed the chance to made love with his wife, because she died on their wedding night. Since that night he obsessively repeats the same ritual, dressed as a bride himself or by dressing his young niece Viridiana as a bride (Silvia Pinal). Don Mateo (Fernando Ray) is masochistically found in the same position (of abstention from sex) in The obscure object of desire, because the young girl that he has fallen in love with systematically drives him back, thereby tormenting him. Perhaps the common characteristic of Gloria, Viridiana and –most of all– Severin in Belle de jour is their repressed masochism. The cold, religiose and utopian Viridiana wants to do good. In exchange she only gets masculine violence on her nice body, i.e. two rape attempts. Gloria (El), the Belle de jour, Viridiana and the heroines of The criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, all become the quarry of men and become their victims, because they are led there by their latent masochism. In Bunuel’s pantheon, though, we also find expansionist females, who disturb the moral order and the masculine law. Susana, of the 1950 Mexican film under the same title, and Celestine (Jeanne Moreau) in The diary of a chambermaid (1963) intrude as maids in rich bourgeois houses in the countryside. With the eroticism they spread about they disturb the balance of the sodden urges of men as well as the conservative state of things. The diary of a chambermaid is Bunuel’s first French film. Bunuel adapted Marimbaud’s novel under the same title, making considerable changes to it. The most important change was the fact that Bunuel shifted the action from the end of the 19th century to 1930, the era of the rise of right-wing extremists in France. His political goal was to deal with the chauvinist and reactionary right wing supporters.
The diary of a chambermaid begins with the advent of the beautiful chambermaid Celestine from Paris. Bunuel describes the provincial burgeois family as a relic of the state of affairs of the old landlords, a mish-mash of catholics, reactionaries, decadent and ridiculous. Bunuel’s mural includes both the bosses and the servants, everyone deep in the same reactionary, right-wing ideas. This is a microcosmos of self-indulgent, decadent and conservative persons. The director, once again, deals with the deceptive harmony of the burgeoise class through the problematic burgeois family. He delineates in detail, from a social and political point of view, the characters, also dealing with their love life. Therefore, Bunuel’s approach is addressing issues of sexual policy. This is, then, a film of sociopolitical thought, that mainly addresses the private life of reactionaries.
The presence of Celestine, the chambermaid, in place and in the development of the narrative is catalytic. Immediately she becomes the center of the appetence of every man in the villa: of the hungry for sex and unsatisfied, deprived husband (Micel Piccoli), who cannot make love to his decent, religious and cold wife; as a consequence, he turns to bird and animal hunting and to chambermaids, ugly or beautiful, whom she treats to pointless gabble, in order to drive into a corner in the stables.
Celestin, similarly, is approached by the pervert, old father of the lady of the house. This old man, in turn, seeks the satisfaction of his sexual desires. The capricious old man reminds us of the other middle-aged and over-aged perverts of Bunuel. Fetishist, like Archibaldo de la Cruz or Don Jaime in Viridiana, he lives with an obsession that reminds us of that of Francisco in El: the feet of the maids and the boots with which he dresses them. As the hero in The obscure object of desire, he suffers from intense masochism. He cleans and polishes the maids’ shoes in order to be humiliated, in order to become inferior even to the most dirty part of the lowermost people in the hierarchy in the house (see George Battaille). Not able to cope anymore with the tension of his fetishist passion, he suffers a heart attack while keeping Celestin’s beloved boots tight against him. Bunuel sketches the noble and polite old man with sympathy, in spite of the fact that he casts such a decadent temperament upon him. The old man accepts the claim of Huysmans, the author, that the dominant social classes cannot be respectable. His perversions are painless to the others, it’s only him they turn against and they lead him to self-destruction.
On the contrary, the perversions of the fascist caretaker, Josef, are dangerous for the people that surround him. He is depraved of sex, puritan (he accepts making love with Celestin only after he is promised that they will marry), and filled in violent, incontrollable compulsions (he kills the hens in the farm slowly and sadistically) His compulsions find a way out in political, fascist violent, as well as in sexual violence, and more particularly in the rape and murder of a little girl in the woods. Bunuel, by attacking this sordid and reactionary character, scoffs as his beliefs in order, the army and religion, in a real surrealist and seditious spirit.
Th. Soumas