L'AGE D'OR Movie Review

The Age of Gold
The Golden Age

Explicitness and outrageousness should never be confused; it's because of the difference between them that even though highly graphic depictions of human sexuality are not unusual in the cinema of the 1990s, the release in today's cultural climate of a film as proudly subversive as Luis Buñuel's revolutionary 1930 L'Age d'Or would be impossible. Written together with Salvador Dali as a calculated affront to even the most liberal bourgeois values, L'Age d'Or does contain the bones of a conventional story, but the flesh that Buñuel heaps on them is sensuous, suggestive, and deeply disturbing. A man and a woman (those are their only names) are so anxious to make love that it's difficult for him to fit all of her fingers into his mouth, even though doing so causes his eyes to roll back into his head alarmingly far. Distractions are everywhere—including the now-legendary cow on the bed—and the church's antipathy toward the couple's physical desires may be the most daunting of all to overcome. Pauline Kael has described L'Age d'Or as “the most anti-religious, anti-bourgeois of all of Luis Buñuel's films,” which is saying something. (In Detroit, an observant Catholic attacked a projector that was unspooling Buñuel's The Milky Way as recently as 1980, and the story made page one of the Detroit News.) L'Age d'Or was indeed widely banned following the riots and demonstrations that greeted its initial release, and until 1984 it was still rarely screened in the U.S. Perhaps less shocking now but every bit as brilliantly, hilariously honest, L'Age d'Or retains the power to do that single thing that Jean Cocteau always put highest on his list: “Astonish me.”

NEXT STOP … Un Chien Andalou, The Milky Way, The Blood of a Poet

1930 62m/B FR Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Max Ernst, Pierre Prevert, Marie Berthe Ernst, Paul Eluard; D: Luis Bunuel; W: Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel; C: Albert Duverger; M: Claude Debussy. VHS, LV FCT, IME, GVV