Luis Buñuel was one of the principal architects of
Surrealism, and this, his last and one of his greatest films, testifies as well
as anything to the explosive political power of that enduring 20th century
movement.
In it, wealthy bourgeois Frenchman Mathieu (Fernando Ray)
recounts his infatuation with the much younger Conchita, a working-class dancer
who has cast an erotic spell over him, to a group of fellow travellers on a
cross-country train. In a series of extended flashbacks, we witness Mathieu's
unending struggles to possess her using his money and position, as she
repeatedly eludes his grasp in ever more outlandish manners.
It might not sound like a film with the theme of revolution
at its heart, but, as with Conchita, looks can be deceiving. Ah yes, did I
mention that Conchita literally changes bodies during the course of the
movie? The film is probably most renowned for Buñuel's inspired decision to cast two
actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) in the role of this ultimate femme fatale, alternating between them
from scene to scene, without anyone in the world of the movie seemingly noticing. As a metaphor for our failure to grasp one another, it is
perfectly apt. For Mathieu and us, Conchita can be construed as autonomous,
manipulative, free-willed, sinister, innocent and psychotic, and our reactions
are likely to vary from minute to minute.
But the casting decision is also a bravura example of
metaphorical fluidity, where different objects of desire are substituted for
one another and assume a unified, destabilising meaning. It's a very Surrealist
gesture, as practised for instance by Georges Bataille in his notorious
pornographic work Story of the Eye, where globular objects - an egg,
a bull's testicle, and finally an eyeball - are substituted for one another as
erotic toys in successive episodes of sexual transgression. Bataille and Buñuel both
play upon the way in which this fluidity and traversing of boundaries, where
inanimate items and persons can share the same shifting identity - is itself
both intensely erotic and politically potent. Indeed, elsewhere Bataille
defines eroticism as the transgression of limits, and Conchita's repeated,
protean transgressions therefore make her not only a supremely erotic object of
desire, but also an actively erotic force of disturbing power.
Conchita's shifting persona is the most prominent of the
film's surrealist touches. In the film's grammar, it becomes allied with the
irruptions of terrorist activity Mathieu happens upon in metropolitan France as
he goes about his imperturbably horny quest of conquering his beloved. We
witness car bombings and dead bodies in Parisian streets, but Mathieu passes
them by almost obliviously. Buñuel never lets us know the cause of this
revolutionary ferment, but the juxtaposition with Mathieu's aloof, privileged
bourgeois lifestyle suggests class warfare. If nothing else, by placing
Mathieu's odyssey in this context, Buñuel is clearly mocking the disengagement
and apathy of the closeted, arrogant middle-classes that Mathieu represents.
And within this context, Conchita comes increasingly to
resemble an exterminating angel (to borrow from the title of an earlier Buñuel film)
of the political and social forces amassed against Mathieu in his smug,
sealed-off little world. Her evasion, and the surrealist methods with which it is evoked, emerge as a means of resistance to and a weapon against the
capitalist order Mathieu signifies.
In his final work, then, Buñuel reaffirmed the uses of
surrealism that he had helped to shape in his youth: Once again, the ideology's
destabilisation and traversing of boundaries acts as a necessary affront to the
complacent and terrible order of the accepted world.
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