THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY Movie Review

Le Fantome de la Liberte
The Specter of Freedom

Master surrealist Luis Buñuel's immensely enjoyable, episodic funhouse glides from character to character and bizarre event to bizarre event with the sure logic of a dream. A man rearranging the objects on his mantel disgustedly proclaims, “I'm fed up with symmetry.” A child comes home with a set of pornographic postcards that depict only historical French landmarks. Her parents are outraged. A group of well-dressed, sophisticated friends sitting around a table appear to be gathered for dinner, but are in fact sitting on toilets. (They quietly ask the hostess for directions to the individual cubicles—down the hall and to the left, she tells them—where they can eat in locked privacy.) A missing girl stands before her parents even as they futilely attempt to determine her whereabouts. Buñuel himself is among the firing squad victims in the film's opening recreation of Goya's May 3, 1808. This time, however, the victims shout “Down with liberty!” just before their deaths. That's the crux of Buñuel's thesis, and why his films—despite their surface outrageousness—never seem absurd. Given the choice, Buñuel convincingly and hilariously informs us, we will always choose slavery over freedom. We can reject that discomforting truth if we prefer, but the shot of an ostrich that closes the film seems placed to gently remind us of what denial looks like. This was Buñuel's second-to-last film, made between The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and his 1977 That Obscure Object of Desire.

NEXT STOP … L'Age d'Or, The Exterminating Angel, The Milky Way

1974 104m/C FR Adrianna Asti, Jean-Claude Brialy, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Monica Vitti, Milena Vukotic, Michel Lonsdale, Claude Pieplu, Julien Bertheau, Paul Frankeur, Paul Leperson, Bernard Verley; D: Luis Bunuel; W: Luis Bunuel, Jean-Claude Carriere; C: Edmond Richard. VHS, LV XVC