Summary
A party of dignitaries arrive on the shore of an island to pay homage to some dead heroes
but are outraged to see a couple making love on the beach. The man is dragged away
by police, but he manages to persuade them to release him for services he has rendered
to the state. The man and the women subsequently meet up at a party, but their attempts
to get together are constantly frustrated by their family, guests and other distractions...
Review
After their first collaboration on Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador
Dali attempted to make an equally daring film in which surrealism and anti-bourgeois sentiment
are combined to shocking effect. However, appalled by Buñuel’s anti-religious
ideas, Dali abandoned the project at an early stage and Buñuel went on to make
his first solo film.
With some visually stunning moments and deeply disturbing imagery, combining the profane
with the blatantly erotic, the film shows, in its rawest form, many of the characteristics
of Buñuel’s subsequent great films. The all-out attack on bourgeois society
would become a major theme in the great director’s cinema, but here the passion is totally
untempered, and is as disturbing as it is comic.
Perhaps what is most shocking about this film is the way in which Buñuel splices
surreal elements into what appears, on the surface, to be a conventional film, following
the established conventions of silent cinema. For instance, a scene with a father
playing happily with his son ends with him taking out a rifle and shooting the young boy
dead. A short while later a Catholic priest and a stuffed giraffe are thrown out
of an upstairs window. Any attempt to make any sense of all this is clearly doomed
to failure, or at least to offer a one-way ticket to the nearest lunatic asylum.
The film was financed to the tune of a million francs by the nobleman Vicomte de Noailles,
who commissioned a film every year for his wife's birthday. He was one of the few
people to appreciate the film at the time. When it was first released, there was
a storm of protest. A riot involving two right-wing extremist groups broke out at
the Paris premier in 1930, with ink bottles being hurled at the screen. Even
when it was subsequently banned (for nearly 50 years), it continued to raise passions
in the press.
© James Travers 2001
See also:
The life of Luis Buñuel
Un chien Andalou
Viridiana
El Angel exterminador
Belle du jour
Le Charme
discret de la bourgeoisie
French fantasy films
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