The Phantom of Liberty (La Fantome de la liberte). 1974. Directed by Luis Bunuel.

(1/12/01)

This is another "Monty Python"-type film. I didn't like it. It had some interesting ideas and a few good moments, but overall I didn't find it funny and I didn't find it clever.

It is a series of sketches which are loosely connected--very loosely. A character comes into the middle of one episode and then we follow him on his way without the episode he wandered into concluding. It really seemed like Bunuel didn't care enough or didn't know how to wrap things up so he just went off in a different direction.

As I said, a lot of it didn't seem very clever to me. A middle-aged man offers two little girls some photos or postcards in a suggestive way. They bring them home and show them to their parents who are shocked. When we finally get to see them they are pictures of famous monuments.

We don't get to see these pictures for a while, so it is perfectly obvious that they are not the "dirty pictures" that Bunuel is trying to convince us they are. It is just so damn obvious that it is no surprise at all.

A professor is giving a lecture about laws and morals and customs. These change from culture to culture. Some people would like to radically change the morals that we live by, he says, but this could be very disturbing if carried out. To illustrate his point he describes a scene in which well-dressed people come together to comunally move their bowels asa a social occasion, while they eat in private. A man asks a servant the wayto the dining room where he takes his solitary dinner. A woman knocks on the door (or tries to open it) and he tells her that it is occupied.

This whole fantasy just seemed plain stupid to me. No one seeks a change in moral standards or in customs unless they see benefit in doing so--at least to someone. The professor did not give any reason whyy this reversal of the customs of eating and shitting would be desirable to anybody. It just seemed like a tiresome attempt to shock.

We know that Bunuel hated organized religion, but when he makes fun of it in this picture it just seems juvenile. Hungry soldiers in a church decide to eat the sacred host for food. Some monks come into a woman's room at an inn to pray for her father; they end up playing poker, betting with rosaries and scapulas. The same priests get invited for a drink in the room of a man who wants to perform an s&m routine with a leather-clad dominatrix. The priests run from the room, practically screaming.

I suppose that scenes such as these have a liberating effect on some people, but I'm just not there any more. They don't shock me and I don't find them clever or amusing.

A lot went on at that inn. A young man (I would say he is around 19 or 20) brings his elderly aunt there for an assignation. She doesn't want to go through with it. He pleads with him to let him see her naked. Then he turns violent, wanting to have sex with her. This scene brings up the taboo subject of the sexuality of the elderly which is seen elsewhere in Bunuel's films. I found that scene truly distasteful--which is what I am sure Bunuel wanted. OK, so Bunuel "got me." So what? There is something he can make me uncomfortable about.

There is also a sequence about a serial killer (or mass murderer--he's a sniper who shoots people at random from windows high up in a building) who becomes a celebrity, with people asking him for his autograph, after the trial. That part of the film left me unmoved, maybe because it's a subject which has been done in other films, maybe because it's so sadly true.

There are a few other surreal images that I remember. Strange things happen to a man with insomnia, such as animals coming into his bedroom. A man reminisces about his sister and we see her playing the piano nude. But again, my reaction is, "So what?" Maybe I'm just not attuned to surrealism. I just don't see any point in a lot of this.

One part of the film that I did like was when a little girl is reported missing from school, possibly kidnapped, and she's right there all the time. When she tries to tell them that she is there they tell her not to interrupt. In a way everyone knows that she's there because, for example, the police take down her description by looking her over. I think this had an impact because I have had the experience in my own head of not making such obvious connections.

I liked the ending, too. The police or the military go to fire on demonstrators who are shouting, "Down with liberty." They go for a confrontation at the zoo. You never see the demonstrators; you only hear the confrontation while looking at the heads of animals. That scene really did have an impact.

But as a whole I found The Phantom of Liberty kind of pointless and annoying to watch. It didn't seem to add up to very much.

I did enjoy seeing Adolfo Geli and Michael Lonsdale, two performers whom I only know from Bond movies.