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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.

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