Wouldn't you consider this depiction realism, apart from the fantastic additions? The pilgrimages were the most bawdy, riotous, sexual of events - back to Chaucer. In fact, the depictions too, drew in fantastical elements.

Incidentally, "Belle De Jour" was given its tribute in Bollywood a few years ago by one of India's great film-makers, Basu Bhattacharya - he made

Hey Aaman,

It certainly is Buñuel's perspective that the degree to which the pilgrims fall short of any Christian ideal is the everyday truth of humanity. As an aesthetic matter, however, in The Milky Way there isn't any zone "apart from the fantastic additions." As in all romance, the fantastic helps give the narrative its symbolic dimension so we know that the storyteller is talking about more than what's literally represented.

Thanks for the tip about the Indian Belle de Jour and thanks for the comment.

The name of the film was missing in my last comment - It's called "Aastha, or In the Prison of Spring" - available on DVD/IMDB

I quite liked this article; it's a generous, thoughtful, and intelligent assessment that views this peculiar film from many sides and never takes an easy way out. Personally, The Milky Way not one of my favorites. I find it hard to sit through. It seems a little too dogmatic, and the jokes are a little too labored and "studied." That closing comment seemed the biggest joke of all, really, as Bunuel seemed more concerned with historical accuracy than humor.

Still, I enjoyed the way you treat Bunuel's atheism as a matter of some complexity, which most critics don't.

The curious thing about Bunuel's great films is that he realizes how easy -- and uninteresting -- an attack on religion is; he's intrigued by why people believe, and he invests his believers with a curiously ambiguous sympathy.

As some critic somewhere once said, there is, with Bunuel, always a "yes, but..." He doesn't always give the audience a side to choose between good and evil. Take Viridiana, for example, in which a former nun has the Christian notion of opening her inherited mansion to the a gaggle of homeless bums, who repay her by wrecking the place and raping her. Some people see the film as an attack on the useless piety of Christianity, others as an attack on sentimental liberalism -- but as soon as you accept that view, it seems shallow, cynical, somehow anti-humane. Is Bunuel saying you shouldn't bother to help the poor -- or is he, possibly, simply casting a harsh light on the fate of saints in a world as cruel as our own? Same goes for Nazarin. Bunuel has a marvelous way of taking your preconceived notions and twisting them into balloon animals.

It sometimes seems to me he invests his natural enemies with understanding, and his natural allies with contempt. As you note, the Fernando Rey character in Tristana does seem to share certain traits with Bunuel; he's the ultimate controlling villain of the film, but he spouts the kind of conventional liberal opinions and attitudes I suspect Bunuel would share.

Anyway, nice work.

Hey Rodney,

Thanks for that interesting comment. "Yes, but" is perfect for Buñuel. The latest example I've come across is in Abismos de pasión, his adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in the treatment of the old man who defends Jorgito against his brutal, drunken father but also throws a frog on a brazier and brandishes a cross to exorcise the hacienda of the Heathcliff figure. At the end the old guy reads from the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, 2:1-4, which paraphrases the beliefs of the ungodly. Their "improper" thoughts are probably a good summary of Buñuel's outlook on life. Buñuel's vigilance against complacency makes him such a fascinating, challenging artist.

Abismos de pasion is a terrific film, although I haven't seen it in years. Let me go back to something you said earlier though: Los Olvidados as a "liberal allegory." I know precisely what you mean, but I'm no longer sure if Bunuel was perfectly sincere in that regard, if there's not some ironic distance to that movie. Yes, it begins with that heavy-handed narrator appealing to the progressive forces to stop the blight of poverty, but the movie that follows holds out no hope whatsoever: it even ends with a boy being tossed on a garbage dump. Bunuel's essential statement of life on earth? Maybe.

I can't really argue your points on The Brute, but the politics aren't what stand out for me; I think of as the most effective, straightforward and uncluttered of the romantic melodramas Bunuel made in his Mexican years, and the horniest. Wasn't Katy Jurado a fantastic beauty? Over 20 years later she played the sheriff's wife in Pat Garrett and Billy the kid.

Hey Rodney,

I know what you mean about the possible distance between Buñuel and the liberal allegory of Los Olvidados. We never return to the juvenile farm to see what the director makes of the boy's failure to return with the money. Many of the Mexican movies have the feel of commissioned work that he inevitably Buñuel-izes to the extent possible.

I agree that Katy Jurado was pretty amazing in The Brute. (Her role as the bounty hunter in Pat Garrett confirmed for me the feeling that she would have made a much tougher sheriff in High Noon than Gary Cooper.) And I love the handling of the old man who sneaks out of bed for candy.

I always derive pleasure from thinking about Buñuel's world.

Alan,

Not quite Bunuel, but did you catch this report about the restoration of The River and Pather Panchali? There are Bunuel connections, though

Hey Alan,

I don't know if you remember me at all, but I emailed you a couple of months ago and admire how you critque movies. You remind me so much of reading Pauline Kael and James Agee, yet at the same time, you have your own voice as well. Your "The Milky Way" review was the best from you so far (and that's saying a lot, because I'm a huge fan of your reviews when it concerns film structure, irony used as a genre, naturalism, romance, etc.) I've said this before, and I'm going to say it again: Reading your reviews is better than watching the film. And I mean that. Maybe to some on this site I'm being a sycophant. Well, so be it: I'm just speaking my mind.

By the way: Have you seen the movie "Crash"? I would love to read a full review of that movie from you. Take care.

Jamal Sledge

Oh, by the way, I just wanted to mention that the email I sent you a couple of months ago was probably under the pin name I use "Preston Powell". So sorry if that caused you any confusion. I can't wait to read more reviews from you (I'm crossing my fingers and hoping you tell your fans, like myself, what you think not only of "Crash" but also the upcoming "War of the Worlds") I guess the main reason why I want to read your review of "Crash" because you have such a cultural understanding about race and class issues here in American (for anyone who needs to be proven this, just read his amazing reviews on "Friday," "Booty Call," "Better Luck Tomorrow," "Hotel Rwanda," etc. to see how perspicacious Alan is.)

Ok, this is my final post. This is my first time posting on blogcritics (but I've been a huge fan of Alan's for a long time now) so I just wanted to applaud him for yet another amazing job.

Alan, I have a question dedicated to you in my new quiz post

Hey Aaman,

I did read your interesting article on Ray and Renoir. Two of the greatest directors, of course, and about as different from Buñuel as it's possible to get. Along with De Sica they represent the highest achievement at the opposite end of the spectrum: the sympathetically realistic way of looking at the world.

And I am honored to have the Francis Bacon question in your quiz dedicated to me. The Bacon retrospective at the Beaubourg in Paris was one of the great museum-going experiences of my life.

Cheers!

Hey Jamal,

Thanks for writing. Let me assure you I don't receive praise like that so often as to forget it, or to be jaded about it. It's very encouraging to know someone out there is tuning in and turning on (but not dropping out).

I just saw Crash and am nursing my thoughts about it in preparation for writing (though I can tell you they're generally negative). War of the Worlds is the kind of movie I skip, but Tom Cruise has made such a bizarre spectacle of himself lately I'm tempted. If only he'd lose control onscreen instead of off.

Thanks again for taking the time to write.

Can you recall any artist who lost it onscreen, and it was captured for posterity?

Try Dusan Makavejev.

Hey Aaman,

Nope. I was being flip. What I meant was that I wish Tom Cruise could genuinely let go. To me, his performances in Jerry Maguire and Magnolia feel effortful. He may be crazy in real life but as an actor he's all business.

Great actors can seem to lose it, but I suspect they're very much in control when they do. Jeanne Eagels at the end of The Letter, for instance, or Bette Davis wiping her mouth in disgust in Of Human Bondage.

I saw the Milky Way sometime in the late 60's at an art house theatre in Seattle (the Ridgemont). Contrary to what you suggested, I found it to be one of the most startingly memorable films, or at least full of vignettes and snippets that have stuck in my brain ever since. Certainly it is not a film one could describe to another in any directly coherent fashion, in five or fifty sentences, however.

Thanks for the comment, Steve. I don't think we disagree, however. The fact that The Milky Way disassembles itself so readily into memorable "snippets" and "vignettes" was exactly what I was talking about, and I don't mean it as negative criticism ("I often remember an episode with pleasure but can't reliably name which movie it appears in"). The point, rather, was to get at why Buñuel would want to make a movie that fell apart, if pleasurably, in memory.