There’s a bad tendency in
critical circles of attributing greatness to art simply because it’s made by
great artists, which is to say that anything rendered by someone with a record
of significant accomplishments is therefore, by definition, significant. I’ve
certainly been guilty of this infraction, heaping undeserved praise on work
that I wanted to be good simply because of my loyalty to the creator of that
work. And, it should be said, important artists in any field deserve the
benefit of the doubt, at least to a certain degree; sometimes it’s helpful for
an artist to expand his or her body of work without necessarily bettering past
accomplishments. The goal of this preamble is to contextualize my declaration
that I don’t know what the hell to make of Luis Buñuel’s penultimate feature, The Phantom of Liberty.
Conventional in its
technical execution but abstract in most other regards, the movie comprises a
series of loosely connected episodes, all of which seem to satirize the upper
class, a lifelong target of Buñuel’s comedic invective. Some stand-alone
vignettes are amusing, and others are pleasantly weird, but I didn’t lock into
the film’s frequency at all, finding The
Phantom of Liberty flat and pointless more often that not. However, many
intelligent people swear the film is brilliant, and Buñuel said it was among
his favorite creations. So who am I to say if it’s “bad” or “good”? After all,
if I’ve gone too far in the other direction, lauding work that didn’t deserve
accolades, it logically follows that I’ll periodically err in the other
direction, missing the virtues of something wonderful. Accordingly, before I
offer a bit of description, I’ll leave it at this—The Phantom of Liberty did nothing for me, but Buñuel was such a
skilled filmmaker, even at this late stage of his life, that I’m confident
something of value imbues the picture.
The
Phantom of Liberty opens in Spain during the time of Napoleon. Crude French
soldiers invade a crypt, and a male statue swats one of the soldiers after the
soldier kisses a female statue. On the surface, it’s a dumb sight gag right out
of an Abbott and Costello flick, but underneath, it’s laden with all sorts of
weighty political stuff about class and culture. And so it goes from
there—every so often, The Phantom of
Liberty provides something accessible and silly, like the image of monks
drinking and smoking while they play poker with a woman, but more frequently,
the film presents things that would require either a political-science degree
or superhuman insight into Buñuel’s mind to correctly interpret. The movie’s
code isn’t fully secret, which is to say that mindful viewers can arrive at
valid interpretations, but, plainly, only the filmmaker truly knew what the sum
effect of the movie was meant to be.
As to the question of whether the picture
genuinely has a grand design, it’s interesting to consider the most successful
comedy scene, which is obvious and self-contained. In the scene, several
well-to-do people gather for a dinner party, then sit on commodes that surround
a table and perform excretory functions while chatting. Upon achieving relief,
a guest discreetly asks the maid, “Excuse me, where is the dining room?” Also
during the scene, a mother admonishes her child for being so rude as to mention
food at the table. It’s a simple flip of social conventions, and the absurdity
of the scene is entertaining, but what’s the point? To imply that everything
normal and polite is inherently ridiculous, or simply to make viewers engage
reality on a deeper level by presenting an upside-down version of reality? Like
I said before, I recognize there’s something resonant here, but damned if I can
figure out what that is.
The Phantom of Liberty: FUNKY
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