Ah, pilgrims, who move along thinking
perhaps of things not present,
do you come from so far a place,
as your faces show,
that you do not weep when you pass
through the center of the grieving city,
like those people who seem not to understand
any part of its heavy sorrow?--Dante, Vita nuova, ch. XL
When I think about the movies of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, or Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, I often remember an episode with pleasure but can't reliably name which movie it appears in. This is probably because those movies were the product of the makers' long experience in composite-format variety-show theater. The same thing happens, however, when I think about Luis Buñuel's late trio of movies--The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and The Phantom of Liberty (1974)--which are nothing if not unified by an artistic vision. The fragmentary effect in Buñuel thus feels deliberate in a way it doesn't with the Marx Brothers, et al. In these three string-of-joke movies by Buñuel the director refuses to commit to his plots, such as they are, because he knows how readily, and unthinkingly, we consent to the seductions of narrative. He wants these movies to fall apart on us, to evade packaging as entertainment "product." His attitude seems to be, If you insist Daddy tell you a story he's going to make it one you won't remember.
In Belle de Jour (1967), his last picture before this trio, Buñuel focused on a central character developed in a dominant, integral story arc and played by a chic movie star (Catherine Deneuve, dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent). For Buñuel, however, the access to a wider audience these components permit isn't the road to freedom but to constraint, from which he seems immediately to have sought escape. (He worked with Deneuve again in Tristana (1970), a Franco-era deromanticization of the story of Tristan and Isolde, in which everybody gets what the movie's seducer-cuckold and feudal-socialist gasbag of a King Mark figure deserves. For this reunion Buñuel dyed Deneuve's signature blonde hair auburn, dubbed her voice into Spanish, and amputated her character's leg.) Thus, to a startlingly new degree in The Milky Way, Buñuel's ironic approach to subject matter merges with an ironic approach to form as a way of challenging our taste for the usual gratifications of storytelling.
The Milky Way is the transition between the tight anecdotal narratives of The Exterminating Angel (1962), Simon of the Desert (1965), and Belle de Jour and the atomized vaudeville of The Phantom of Liberty. The movie does have a venerable structure--Buñuel follows two contemporary pilgrims on the medieval route down through southern France and across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, where the remains of Saint James the Apostle were thought to be interred. (Click here for information about the historical pilgrimage; here for information about the pilgrimage route today.) In chivalric romance the itinerant hero represents the soul on its spiritual journey through life; in the romance of pilgrimage, as in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the hero even more radically epitomizes the soul on its quest for salvation. Buñuel's two pilgrims, an older man (Paul Frankeur) and a younger (Laurent Terzieff), however, are decidedly not the pious seekers of romance and not only seem unengaged in the spiritual meaning of their journey but incapable of learning from what they witness. Thumbing rides down the busy highway, they're quite ordinary sinners--they take the Lord's name in vain, steal a ham when they're hungry, curse a driver who passes them by (with surprisingly immediate results), run into the woods with a roadside hooker. (They make pilgrimage indistinguishable from vagabondage.) They're still the allegorical protagonists of romance but now they represent modern western man, surrounded by the trappings of Christian culture but not meaningfully devoted to it.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
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
2 - Alan Dale
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.
3 - Aaman
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
4 - Rodney Welch
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.
5 - Alan Dale
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.
6 - Rodney Welch
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.
7 - Alan Dale
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.
8 - Aaman
Alan,
Not quite Bunuel, but did you catch this report about the restoration of The River and Pather Panchali? There are Bunuel connections, though
9 - Jamal Sledge
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
10 - 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.
11 - Aaman
Alan, I have a question dedicated to you in my new quiz post
12 - Alan Dale
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!
13 - Alan Dale
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.
14 - Aaman
Can you recall any artist who lost it onscreen, and it was captured for posterity?
15 - Rodney Welch
Try Dusan Makavejev.
16 - Alan Dale
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.
17 - Steve Callihan
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.
18 - Alan Dale
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.