The Milky Way (1969) - Luis Buñuel

Buñuel had begun for the sixties what was his final stage, the final stage of his film career, finally had been able to get the long-awaited repatriation to European soil, the filmmaker was back to shot in Europe in a stable and sustained basis, with all the means that this meant, it was time to reach its highest audiovisual heights. Buñuel decided to make this film during a presentation of Belle de jour (1967), and together with his then-habitual Jean-Claude Carrière, he elaborates a work of his own, and with great rigor in its elaboration, usual in the spanish, generating a script based on many illustrious texts and encyclopedias of the subject, theology, diverse heresies to complete this bizarre and surreal story. It is the singular story of two individuals who embark on the traditional road to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, the well-known pilgrimage journey to seek absolution and free the soul from sins, but on that path, a very diverse collection of characters and events will get happening, many even in another space and time. One of the most personal works of the director, addressing one of its traditional topics, religion, Christianity, of course from the singular buñuelian magnifying glass, with the touches of a surrealism that the director had already curdled and evolved.

                 

We see a quick introduction to the history of Santiago de Compostela, traditional site of pilgrimages around the world. We see two vagabonds, Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), walk on a highway, receive alms from an individual, then board a car from which they are soon evicted. Two individuals then have heated religious discussion about Eucharist and transubstantiation, the vagabonds attend Rome, they see how Priscillian (Jean-Claude Carrière) was restored in his power, in gnostic meeting. In a hotel, the head waiter, Richard (Julien Bertheau), talks about his Christian beliefs, while the Marquis de Sade (Michel Piccoli) talks to a girl about his heresy. Then we see Jesus (Bernard Verley), his mother Mary (Edith Scob), is the multiplication of bread and wine. Pierre and Jean continue on their way, walk along the highway, attend an unforeseen accident, in whose car they see an Angel of Death (Pierre Clémenti), we see a nun submit to martyrdom, she is crucified as Christ. Later, a Jesuit (Georges Marchal) and a Jansenist (Jean Piat) fight for the concepts of freedom. They attend a preaching of a story about the Virgin, there is another story about despising lust, they find a prostitute on the way, they follow her, and a last sequence with Christ takes place, he heals the blind.

The beginning of the film is correct, where the parallel is drawn and we are told what is Santiago de Compostela, Campo de Estrellas (stars field), the title of the film's Milky Way is justified, the path to seek absolution, pilgrimage; likewise it fuses in a great way, with a great ellipsis, the antiquity, that old map, with the contemporaneity, its cars and highways. It was noticeable that Belle de jour's production was still fresh then, that initial sequence is a good summary, an advance of what the film will be and its temporary jumps, without doubt that narrative freedom, how free it was to chain and structure the story practically to pleasure was something that pleased the director. As in that film, the severe narrative freedom leads to that rapturous liberty to capture and merge different spaces and times, that freedom is certainly what allows infinity, the infinite versatility of possibilities in the film, as it was done in the past, a collection of diverse stories of space and time, just to give an example, and with the obvious distances from one case to another, we have Leaves From Satan's Book (1921) by Dreyer. Thus, we have Priscillian and his faithful, in the fourth century, or the duel between the Jansenist and the Jesuit, discussion that happens in the seventeenth century, also the spanish bishop with his faithful leads us to the sixteenth century. The core of the film is the subtle and serene parade of heresies, a journey that transgresses the temporal space barriers, seen symbolically in the pilgrimage journey undertaken to Santiago de Compostela, the Field of Stars, the Milky Way, unbeatable scenery certainly for the intentions of the iberian. And the filmmaker portrays key figures of Christianity, the Eucharist, the transubstantiation, are captured in the film in the manner of Buñuel of course, and with a naturalness that helps the surrealism to develop just more fluently, naturally, simply, with worldliness. Thus, the initial discussion on transubstantiation, which ends with the priest being imprisoned, is therefore a discussion that unfolds anodynely, in a mundane way, bringing this whatt is portrayed to everyday, common life. But apart from figures, it also raises questions, whether God is a single entity, or is fragmented in the Holy Trinity, to name an example.

In this way, the VI century is fused vigorously, the gnosticism of Prisciliano, it is undoubtedly the Buñuelian style, a questioning as fervent as no other one, to the religion, these questions will flow copiously, and also naturally, in a very similar way to the style of the spanish, simple but harsh questions, almost like Father Lizardi in Death in the Garden (1956), Nazarín (1959) or, of course, in Simon of the Desert (1965). The questions, the inquisitive questions faced by his characters, was something inevitable in almost all the films of the filmmaker, but in this opportunity, the nature, the origin of these questions, is entirely religious, an inescapable subject for the filmmaker, of rigorous Christian formation in his childhood; it is his script, his story, his religious obsessions, a work that is very much his. Again, the protagonist character of Buñuel undertakes a journey that will mean discovery, but in this case, different from Viridiana (1961) and Nazario, there is no fall, now there are diverse adventures, of different times and characters, far away chronologically, but close and united in another aspect: the subject of heresy and Christian questions. However, Buñuel was not known for giving us certainty in his films, on the contrary, many of his most famous endings, such as Belle de jour, responded, in his own words, to his own uncertainty, to his own lack of certainty of the filmmaker regarding the outcome for his characters in what he raises, but also regarding the questions he poses; shares the director, lets us share in his uncertainty, his acid lack of certainty. On this occasion, like the young priest who asks a more experienced one, there are inquisitive questions, which the filmmaker makes to himself, but again, there will be no answers, the debates are shaped, not the solutions; nevertheless, debates are quite well documented, because the master delved into recognized texts, such as History of the Spanish Heterodoxes of Menéndez and Pelayo and Manuscript found in Zaragoza, among others; the director documented a lot on the subject, sometimes it is even said that he transcribed literally many of the dialogues and parliaments of the characters on which he relied. There is a constant reference in the film to the idea that on earth is better than in heaven, a Gnostic thought is postulated, a very buñuelian concept is also prefigured, the fact of a human being meditating not to be the real owner of his actions, that freedom does not exist, that liberty is a ghost. By hating science and technology, will end up approaching God, says a character, the characteristic irony of spanish continues to reinforce the idea of ​​Gnosticism.

It is interesting that, according to the theme portrayed, Christ is shown earthly, without his divine aura, chewing, laughing, doing nonsense, walking awkwardly, in effect, it is a gnostic, trivialized and mundanized story, the path is marked in a way of the picture. Jesus performs final miracle, returns sight to the blind, but says, disturbingly, that he does not bring peace, that he will alienate parents and children, daughters and mothers, he says to those who follow him, like blind. Buñuel can finally portray with his corrosive style the religion, the Christianity, and he does not restrain, there is the powerful figure of the execution to the Pope, the questioning of the church, something nothing strange in Buñuel, it acquires very strong features here, we also have the shot to the rosary of the Virgin, the usual self-confidence of the director to face Christian symbols and figures. Some characters are warmly sketched, insinuated, like the young mute on the road, with scars in the manner of stigmas, recalling Christ; others see Satan in the old man who takes them to ancient Rome, and we have the emergence of another important historical figure in the Buñuel work, Sade, to whom will be possible to see merged with the other stories thanks to another escape of space and time. His winks will never disappear, Jesus Christ, in the scene of the virgin telling him not to shave, adjust the blade, in the manner of An Andalusian Dog (1929), the priests made skeletons, of The Golden Age (1930). While the eternal figures for a moment are absent (incredible but true, in the film we can not find a female with self-confidence showing off their ominous thighs and calves), we have clear the wink of the feet at a certain moment. We will see more than once the image of individuals walking on a highway, a road with a blue and clear sky background, an image that would become repeated in his later exercises, the director had finally reached his final aesthetic. Technically it does not reach the mastery of recent films, such as The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), because the background, rather than the form, is all this time. But that is why the genius in the style of the iberian is not absent, we have the sequence of the priest speaking to a small congregation, among them the vagabonds, speaks to the camera with traveling included, the character looks at us, in a pleasant technical resource rarely seen in the spanish. Another resource, again the priest talking to a couple about how to please the virgin repudiating the lust, the priest is outside but at the same time inside their bedroom, at the foot of their beds. Buñuel, already in the final stage of his career, has a consolidated group of actors, who will accompany him to the end of his filmography, we have Michel Piccoli, Georges Marchal, Delphine Seyrig, Julien Bertheau, all always well directed by the master, and Jean-Claude Carrière, the co-writer, repeats as an actor in a brief foray. The end was perfect to the structuring of the work, finally have reached their destination, Santiago de Compostela, again we take as a reference to Belle de jour, that ending that connects perfectly with the beginning, turns the feature into a capicúa picture, everything ends articulated, like a cycle that repeats itself, after all witnessed, we return to the beginning, the subject who said that they must find a prostitute, the prostitute is finally found, and repeats what the initial subject said, wants to engender children, and call them "you are not my people" and "no more mercy", phrases that continue with what is captured in the film. Buñuel was already in the final phase of his film career, his style is almost finished, his art is powerful, some of his major exercises were close to being done, and this is an exemplary film of the maturity achieved by the master from Calanda.

Belle de jour (1967) - Luis Buñuel

By the sixties, Buñuel had begun his last stage as a filmmaker, and this can be asserted from different perspectives. But let's go in parts. After finally, after decades of exile, having returned the director to Europe with The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), having necessarily returned to Mexico to shoot Simon of the Desert (1965), finally Buñuel takes a giant step towards what can be called his definitive cinematographic form, aesthetically, narratively, symbolically, among other ways of asserting this. The spanish, in one of his best films, and with the greatest commercial reception, adapts a novel by Joseph Kessel, which narrates the unique story of a woman, aristocratic woman, married to a prominent individual, seems to have a perfect life, surrounded of luxuries and amenities; but she, due to a series of traumas and obsessions, can not approach her husband sexually. In return, she frees her sexuality by attending clandestinely, in the afternoons, to a brothel, practicing prostitution. She will thus initiate a double life, which will set her free, but at a high price. In a film in which the severe surrealism that never disappeared in spanish began to appear, but reaching the final and sophisticated form of Buñuel's cinema, as he always did, he coherently uses his usual audiovisual resources, already touching his moment of greatest brilliance.

                  

In a road, a couple of aristocrats travels in tílburi, and then after showing she her disdain, he causes his two servants in the car to flagellate her in the middle of the forest; but everything is a fantasy, she is Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), lives with her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel); one day she meets a unique friend of Pierre, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli). A woman tells Séverine how a mutual friend is engaged in prostitution, leaving her very restless; she meets Husson again, he gives her the address of a local brothel, and she goes, meets Madame Anais (Geneviève Page), who manages the place. She hesitates at the beginning, but begins to work as a prostitute, works in the afternoons, while her husband works, that is why she is baptized as Bella by day, attends a businessman, a prominent gynecologist, a rude Asian man who violents her, and she enjoys it. She then meets a strange duke (Georges Marchal), who participates in a complex necrophilous representation; she continues to maintain her double life, and improves her relations with Pierre. She meets another client, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), on another occasion, both of them are attracted, but her wedding anniversary trip awakens in him a lot of jealousy. One day, to the brothel goes Husson, they recognize each other, while a jealous Marcel arrives at Séverine's house, and shoots Pierre, leaves him in a coma. But apparently everything was another fantasy.

The film is, from its exquisitely surrealist approach, Séverine's journey of liberation, of exploration, of her most intimate impulses, and the first image we will see will be of great symbolism, orange trees, autumnal trees with their dark orange leaves opening the movie. Well framed is that first image, and also that sequence, symmetrical, while cinegetic sound flows. The only thing we hear, as in a daydream, are the bells, the sound and the characters are slowly entering the scene, slowly grow in size and intensity, a short introduction to what we will see. It is one of the best opening sequences of Buñuel's filmography, not with too much margin of error could be asserted that it is even the best of them all, in the sense that it is an extraordinary exordium, an exemplary proem of what we will see, a sample of that unreal fantasy -or maybe not so unreal-, of what happens, of the unknown that will float on whether it is all reality or fantasy, and where the inside of her head is clearly diagrammed, the palpitating sexual obsessions of hers that are the heart of the film, fantasy afterwards which she lies, almost lifeless. Great beginning, that connects perfectly with the end, union without seams, nerver-seen the forcefulness of the film in that sense. She first has an intense sexual fantasy, and then avoids sex with her husband, we are already drawn to the complex this-time female character, the contradiction is already served; then fantasize at levels more sadistic, more humiliating, but for her satisfactory, as her facet of prostitute evolves. His double life is a severe contradiction, avoiding sex with the husband, satisfying herself in masochistic prostitution, a contradiction that is added to that of reality opposed to unreality, dissimilar binomials that are one of the recurrent guidelines of the surreal manifesto. The more submerged she is in her world of prostitution, the further away from her husband, she feels paradoxically closer to him, she meditates; the carriages, the elegant dinners, the tennis games, all that comfort is the opposite of what she wants. There is a renewed variety in the resources of the director's narrative, in the ways that Buñuel uses to get out of linearity in his narration, the way, to a certain extent sudden and violent, in which those ruptures or changes take place, the passage, from what with very faint certainty can be called reality, to fantasy, memory, or trauma. These characteristics turn the film into a certain indecipherable way, impossible to discern with complete certainty - as if this with Buñuel was something new...-, if something is real or unreal, being exemplary of this transitive violence from one world to another the sequence of the girl, the suspicious child rape that has turned Séverine into what she is, a complex woman who can not manifest her pleasure and carnal enjoyment in a normal way, that is, towards the man she loves, her two worlds, love and flesh, husband and her office, are incompatible.

And those violent irruptions, apart from sudden, separate both worlds without being conventionally indicated -like a classic flashback-, in that violent course, the limit of the real to the oneiric vanishes, from the present to a probable past, to the memory, is diluted. Without falling into the delirium of his beginnings of crude and pure surrealism, now the director is an artist who shows his particular maturity, and not to lose the habit, among those many irruptions, religion looms, and even Séverine looks at the camera, to us through her sunglasses, in the respective sequence. This is a new way of structuring his cinematic story, the director polishes his surrealism, since this, the dissolution of boundaries between onirism and reality, between one time and another, is characteristic of surrealism, and elements like ticking clocks will be added, bells, sleighbells, those sounds foreign to the diegetic are the threads, the vehicles through which events are articulated. Thus, the oneiric resources are at the filmmaker's complete disposition, it is the full freedom that achieves when there is no tangible dividing line between reality and dreams; for example, the singular duel between husband and friend occurs when her world of double life finally breaks down, duel from which symbolically -or maybe not-, Pierre is victorious, while the irony of the husband's friend is served, with him the demented journey begins, and Séverine's odyssey ends with him as well. Other elements characteristic of the dream flow, the constant insinuation to the cats, in their first fantasy and then with the necrophilic duke; then Pierre looks at an abandoned wheelchair on a street, a raw premonition. As it was said at the beginning of the previous paragraph, she in the film discovers her sexuality, matures, even with her husband she finally seems to find balance and well-being in their relationship, although, obviously, she never copulates with him; she is a singular character who finds virtue in vice and excess, the morally acceptable disappears, Buñuel's classic study, the human of extreme characteristics, or subjected to extreme circumstances. Then, when she matures, we see the trees again, green now, they have become green, like her, she has gone from the autumn that represented living with her husband, to the flourishing spring of her clandestine life as a prostitute, where all her demons and sexual obsessions have free rein, symbolic chromatic ecstasy. To the force of these sequences, of those frames, collaborate, and much, aesthetically, the vigorously clean images of Sacha Vierny, master who worked with Resnais, Greenaway, among others, who said the director was responsible for his reconciliation with color; visually, after Husson says the whole truth to Pierre, we see overlayed images of trees and buildings, they are the most delirious, he has been crippled, expressive license in precise and significant moment. It is noticed that the director has reached his full maturity, and of course, he does it while he slides to us a new study, a new approach to the bourgeois world, never so violently stripped and violated its principles, its constrainings, limiting conventions that generate this liberator journey in Séverine. A trip necessary for her, she discovers that this, the world of the brothel, is her true world, is her true nature, and her curse, "I will pay for what I do, but I can not live without this," she affirms, a masochist, sadistic, who finds satisfaction and pleasure in being ordered, in being dominated, first sketches a smile when Anais orders her to enter with her first client, and her response to the Asian man's violence confirms what happens to her, her liberated metamorphosis. 

As in many other Buñuelian characters, there is no express Manichaeism, she is not morally condemnable, she achieves her liberation from the ties of conventional society, from reality, it is like freeing oneself from the donkeys that pull the character of An Andalusian Dog (1929), always playing with religion. "How can you fall so low?", asks her after seeing the gynecologist's aberration, without noticing that she is now surrounded by them, sordid prostitutes, she is one of them now, of that place and its human fauna, moreover, the elegant aristocrat is much more successful than any other prostitute, relegates them. Something fascinating happens in the film, one of the topics, one of his usual themes in his characters, is the theme of the wish not fulfilled in them, the desire always frustrated -like the amour fou, the crazy love of The Golden Age (1930), and so many others-, is broken, finally it is with her the desire consummated, and in a brutally violent, sexually challenging way, a singularly unique Buñuel character, it is not surprising that she is a woman. Of course, his everlasting foot fetish will not be absent, we will see the feet of his female protagonist Deneuve, while she climbs with her distinguished shoes the whorehouse, then a curious variety with her feet, and Marcel's foot on top, with sock leaky. Another element flows, and when flowing, as in another article I mentioned, it's like talking to a good comrade, conversation in which you recognize the winks, tics and characteristics of your fellow, now we see it with the stick that moves oil, tar, as The Golden Age, and the everlasting box, of An Andalusian Dog, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1954), among others, and that the women especially asked what was in it, not knowing the filmmaker himself what it was. Technically, his camera behaves with the usual sobriety of that stage of the filmmaker, unfolds with tranquility, something more leisurely than in other occasions, but it walks through situations with elegance, builds sequence shots, briefs, but he does, follow-ups of the characters, the master is already proficient in that aspect, there is even a overhead frame, his versatility with the camera is manifested. It seems so inspired the filmmaker who even dares to do something that almost never happened in his filmography, is encouraged to appear as an actor, although very succinctly, in some segment of the film, as a guest when she meets a client, and then as a passer-by, interesting that the director uses a very improper resource in him. Add a new element to his repertoire of recidivist figures, the characters that hide under the table as we would see in The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and work with European actors whose elegance he missed and wished in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Muni already begins to be his usual, actress who according to the director became something like his pet; in the acting section, the director had also arrived at twilight. The ending is perfect for the film, Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated on the script, worked a lot in this ending, without words, almost never was it, never his images expressed so much without a single monosyllable, frustration, anger, humiliation, the tear begins to roll when he knows the truth, she tries to act normal, impossible, and when we reach the climax, everything may have been a fantasy, everything may have never happened -or not, we just don't know for sure-, ending as prodigious as the beginning, leaving the full-length film as a capicúa number, now there are no leaves on the trees, now the winter has arrived. It is his biggest commercial success, attributed that the filmmaker more to the whores than to his good work as a filmmaker, very typical assertion and consideration of the genius, with the theme of love, a prostitute with a thug, bizarre love, love with a prostitute, theme of effective impact, a situation that not a few filmmakers portrayed. The religious references are not lacking, a character asserts that a bar is never boring, unlike a church "where you are alone with your soul", and the scene of the necrophiliac duke, which was lamentably mutilated by the censorship, Buñuel saying that mentioned sequence lost a lot of its strength. This is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of Luis Buñuel, it was undeniable, the moment of maturity began, the Mexican stage was completely behind, and the highest peaks of Buñuel's cinematographic art would finally see the light.