Sole Criterion: That Obscure Object of Desire
By Brett Ballard-Beach
June 7, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
DVD Spine #143/Laserdisc Spine #113 (both out of print)
I am currently reading In One Person, the latest novel by my favorite living American author, John Irving. Written in the first person (like about every other of his novels), its narrator is on the brink of turning 70, as Irving himself did earlier this year. What I find notable about this novel, especially when taken in tandem with his previous book, Last Night in Twisted River, is Irving’s increasing focus on characters that are, to turn an underutilized epithet, life-sized.
This is in contrast to the larger-than-life figures that populate everything from The World According to Garp to The Hotel New Hampshire to A Prayer for Owen Meany. The familiar Irving archetypes are still present and accounted for, and yes, another faculty member is lost to a frozen wintry death after slipping on an icy patch after an evening of drinking, but there is a strong current of the elegiac, as well as a tamping down of the youthful rambunctioness that had an easy capacity for spilling over into grotesquerie. (A vivid example, even though it comes from Irving in his early 50s, was 1994’s A Son of the Circus, a supremely unpleasant and seamy tale. I punished myself by reading everything except the 50-page epilogue and then never looking back).
Artist, author, filmmaker and charter member of the surrealists Luis Bunuel was born at the dawn of the 20th century and released what proved to be his final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, in 1977, as he eased into his late 70s. Irving published Garp the following year. I hesitate to draw too fine a line connecting their styles or themes, but watching the film for the first time since a theatrical screening about seven or eight years ago, and with the new “softer” Irving fresh in my mind, it helped me see some parallels among aging artists who maintain their vitality and creativity (and to an extent their rage) and reflect it through the creative prism that only can be realized from living long enough to keep honing and perfecting one’s art.
I have seen only a small number of Bunuel’s films, but when I was an adolescent I was in love with the idea of them, particularly The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the former with its dinner guests simply unable to leave the house of their host after their meal and the latter with its protagonists forever sitting down for repast and suffering a severe bout of gourmand interruptus for their troubles. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally had a chance to see two of his most notorious creations, 1929’s Un Chien Andalou and 1930’s L’Age D’or, a pair of collaborations with Salvador Dali that strung together shocking images in the service of attacks on hypocrisy (religious, sexual, financial, and otherwise), and succeeded in giving the still new art movement of Surrealism a cinematic calling card.
Working with his long-time screenwriting collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere and adapting an oft-filmed 1898 French novel (La Femme et Le Pantin, or, The Woman and the Puppet), Bunuel strives to make things “life-sized” even within the context of a plot and a production that has more than its share of surreal and absurd moments. In the film, Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a wealthy distinguished-looking widower, recounts the story of his incurably magnificent sexual and romantic obsession with Conchita, a chambermaid-cum-exotic dancer who entices him and seduces him and leaves him bewitched, besotted, and begging for more, all while steadfastly refusing to give herself to him, physically and/or emotionally. They engage in a slow burn duet of one-upmanship and brinksmanship that makes it all but impossible to imagine that there will be a victor in this battle of the sexes.
The sudden freeze frame on Sevillian palm trees while flamenco guitar plays on the soundtrack (as the opening credits roll) strikes me as inherently amusing - though I am not sure why - and it is that sort of uneasy tone that Bunuel strives to maintain all the way through to the final shot. An example of this is built into the film’s narrative: Mathieu shares his tale with the captive audience in the passenger car on the train he is taking out of Seville and on towards Paris. Such a device often indicates a nostalgic tone, of events squarely in the past. But Mathieu is still deeply entwined with Conchita - he dumps a bucket of water on her head to deter her from boarding the train - and the unraveling of the plot in the closing minutes takes place after his flashback story has ended.
Bunuel began 1862’s The Exterminating Angel with the most glorious of epigraphs:
“The only explanation for this film, from the standpoint of pure reason, is that there is no explanation.”
It bears a striking resemblance to Mark Twain’s ironic rejoinder at the opening of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cautioning:
“[that] persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
Love and longing and sexual passion are already surreal and absurd in their nature (since they are enacted by such flawed creatures as we human beings) and Bunuel has no need for explanations as to why Mathieu so instantly becomes smitten with Conchita. In his story/confession on the train, he is still somewhat sheepish and as baffled as his confessional audience is (and we are). Where the mystery rests is in what Conchita truly feels for her (would-be) lover. It may seem as if she is the only one playing games at times, but Mathieu takes the bait time and again and subjects himself to humiliation as often as Conchita seems determined to visit it upon his head.
One of the bonus features on the Criterion DVD presents excerpts from a 1928 French production of the source novel, accompanied by translations of the text and indications of the parallel scenes in Bunuel’s film. Aside from the shock of seeing the explicit (for its time) French film, what’s striking is how similar those chosen moments are to the scenarios that Bunuel and Carriere have staged. Bunuel has done a fairly faithful only slightly modernized adaptation of the tale. Examining a few of those alterations, as well as the biggest conceit he makes in the nod of his surrealist past, helps to illuminate some of the larger points he strives to make.
Most obviously, there is the title change. No longer The Woman and the Puppet (or anything gender related like Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman, a loose adaptation), it is the enigmatic and (anti?) erotic: That Obscure Object of Desire. (In the original French, nearly the same - Cet obscur objet du desir.) The unexpected use of obscure throws nearly everything into a muddle. Does the phrase refer to Conchita, to women in general, to anything (animate/inanimate) for which someone else exhibits a strong desire? Is obscure meant literally, mockingly, reproachfully? Like so many of Bunuel’s titles, it seems nonsensical and confounding on the surface and then strangely appropriate (if still not entirely opaque) once one has interacted with the film.
The world in which the film takes place seems appropriate for late 1970s Spain and France, except to the degree in which terrorist violence and activity seems to have become upwardly mobile and middle class. Featuring a quite unexpected car bombing early on and ending (the film and his career) with another “bang,” Bunuel casts the sado/masochism of Mathieu and Conchita against a larger scale of even more unsettling and random violence. And far from subjecting the viewer to overkill in order to make his point, Bunuel slips the references in by degrees, allowing for the true not-quite absurdity of the RABJ (Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus) to sink in and honing in on radio broadcasts that posit a world where apparently the fringe rightwing and leftwing have joined forces to wage war on… obscure objects of desire?
If you have even a slight familiarity with the storyline, you will know that the “hook” of the film is that Conchita is played by more than once actress. Two to be precise: Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, who were both in their early 20s during production (playing the teenaged Conchita). What is most surprising is that this conceit was not Bunuel’s idea, or even his original game plan. The actress who had been hired (Maria Schneider from Last Tango in Paris) left early on due to creative differences and it was Bunuel’s producer who floated the idea to the director. There appears to be little rhyme or reason to the switching between the two (although the alternating gives the unverified impression that each actress is onscreen for roughly the same amount of time).
The use of two women to play one role is never acknowledged (even winkingly) by the film or its characters. It is simply a fact. Bunuel’s decision works perfectly because it not only mirrors Mathieu’s frustration at the failure of his every effort to consummate his love with Conchita (just as he seems to be making progress with one version, it is the other one who returns from the lavatory) but it seems providentially, serendipitously Bunuel at its very core. Further, it illuminates Mathieu’s character in that he is rendered all the more pathetic by his inability to see what is right in front of his eyes. At the same time, it deepens Conchita’s character by suggesting that there is more to her than Mathieu can acknowledge and that his inability to allow for her complexities is ultimately what keeps him from “obtaining” her.
Both actresses, each making her debut (or nearly) sustains this layering by giving multi-dimensional performances. Bunuel doesn’t traffic in clichés and so each has her moment to play the virgin and the whore, yes, but also to gain the upper hand, to cede power, to extend to the befuddled widower a tender hand, and to just as cruelly revoke it. Conversely, Rey constructs Mathieu as the model of urbanity, in his grooming, his impeccable manners, and his bearing and then through his crumpled posture, his flashes of violence and his fiery eyes, suggests how easily he sheds his veneer of civility. I noted earlier how similar moments in Bunuel’s film seemed to the earlier silent French version. With the emphasis on the physicality of the performances by the three leads and with the indelible supporting performances like those of Andre Weber as Mathieu’s indispensable valet/confidant/man Friday, I can easily imagine the film having a similar impact with the volume on mute.
And I bring that up, because in a further quirk, French actor Michel Piccoli dubs Rey’s voice. This act mirrors the twinning of Conchita but I can find no concrete explanation for this on the Web or in the interview/essay booklet that accompanies the DVD. Rey’s health does not appear to be an issue and he had appeared in several earlier Bunuel films without being dubbed. As with the use of two actresses, even if there is a perfectly rational, lucid explanation, it doesn’t change the fact that it extends the themes of the film even further. On a side note, I attempted to watch the film a third time using the English dubbed track, but in spite of the fact that the dialogue dubbed in proved to be a near mirror image of the English subtitles, the voices seemed to have been culled from generic American cop show central and it proved too distracting to see through to the end.
That Obscure Object of Desire captivates me with its unnerving air of suspended menace and Bunuel’s willingness to see his bittersweet and caustic tale through to a sort-of happy ending (tellingly in which we hear neither Mathieu’s or Conchita’s voice) and then one step beyond to an ambiguous apocalypse. If earlier Bunuel (like earlier Irving) still seems to maintain more of a hold over me at this point in life, I am willing to make allowances that I still have (a little) youth on my side and I may have a ways to go in order to meet the artist as an elderly man even halfway.
Next time: I dip my toes into the avant-garde with a just released retrospective from the director of my favorite short film of all time. DVD Spine #607.