That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

          The final film of revered Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and also one of his most accessible movies, That Obscure Object of Desire uses several playful storytelling devices while presenting the tale of an older man driven to distraction by his love for a mercurial young woman. Unlike the many May-December movies of the ’60s and ’70s that show middle-aged dudes sharing wisdom with nymphets who open their eyes to new ways of seeing, That Obscure Object of Desire gets after something more, well, obscure. Articulating some of Buñuel’s themes would require giving away the resolution of the story, but in general the picture conveys ideas about class, gender, propriety, and self-image, among many other things. Naturally, Buñuel includes two his favorite tropes, radical politics and surrealism, though they don't render the picture impenetrable, as happened with the director’s previous effort, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Instead, politics and surrealism function like grace notes, adding ambiguity, complexity, and relevance to a story that’s already rich.

          It should also be noted that Buñuel plays a tricky game by accentuating the breathtaking beauty of two starlets, both of whom play the same role (more on that later). It’s as Buñuel hoped to simultaneously satirize older men who court young ladies and beguile the audience with images of nubile flesh. One can only imagine what feminist critics have discovered while dissecting this picture, which somehow manages to celebrate and demonize women in equal measure.

          The picture begins with a droll vignette. After sophisticated gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) boards a train, comely young Conchita (Carole Bouquet) boards a separate car. Matheiu pays an attendant to kick her off, and then Mathieu dumps a bucket of water on her head. The other passengers in his first-class car express shock at his behavior, so he offers to explain why humiliating the woman was preferable to his first impulse of killing her. Buñuel illustrates Mathieu’s story with extended flashbacks. After encountering Conchita for the first time in his own home, where she served briefly as a maid, Mathieu became obsessed with her, chasing Conchita across Europe, offering money to her mother as a sort of dowry, and eventually persuading Conchita to cohabitate. She drove Mathieu mad by repeatedly offering sexual favors, only to refuse them at the last moment. A final round of indignities led to the episode at the train station.

          Among the many peculiar things about That Obscure Object of Desire is the casting of the Conchita role. For no obvious narrative reason, Bouquet shares the role with the equally alluring Angelina Molina. In any given scene, the audience can’t predict which actress will appear, and sometimes, one actress replaces the other in the same scene, thanks to a convenient exit/entrance maneuver. It’s a typically whimsical touch on Buñuel’s part, forcing the audience to ask questions about identity and perception without providing any fodder for answers. The actresses radiate different types of sexiness, Bouqet icy and Molina sensual, so their collective effect on Rey’s character is more than believable. Still, he’s a tougher nut to crack, part worldly aesthete and part love-addled buffoon. These contradictions make his characterization consistent with Buñuel’s longstanding attitude toward the moneyed class. As to the question of whether That Obscure Object of Desire works, the answer is mostly yes. The movie is mysterious and sly and unpredictable, and the final gotcha moment says something bitterly funny about the ephemeral nature of life—after all the fuss, that’s how it ends? It’s a fitting final statement for Buñuel, frustrating and ridiculous and true all at once.

That Obscure Object of Desire: GROOVY

Seven Beauties (1975)

          A nasty piece of business from Italy’s provocative Lina Wertmüller, Seven Beauties tells the grotesque story of a man who survives a violent life as a pimp only to become an inmate in a World War II concentration camp. The film is so deliberately vulgar that the climax involves the protagonist struggling to summon an erection with which to service a morbidly obese prison matron, even though she’s a despicable sadist. One of the overt themes in the challenging picture is that only whores can survive life on the sidelines of a war. Given Wertmüller’s proclivity for threading leftist politics into her narratives, it’s a fair statement of sorts; her movies depict the world as a battle zone pitting the apathetic against the engaged, with her sympathies clearly favoring the engaged. Therefore, a generous reading of Seven Beauties might identify the protagonist as a representation for everything Wertmüller finds craven in society. After all, the movie begins with a weird tone poem/dedication listing various types of people: “The ones who don’t enjoy themselves even when they laugh. Oh, yeah. . . . The ones who listen to the national anthem. Oh, yeah. . . . The ones who at a certain point in their lives create a secret weapon: Christ. Oh, yeah.”
          Seven Beauties is a Grand Statement, but it’s not the easiest one to decipher.

          The movie jumps back in forth in time, juxtaposing the main character’s civilian life with his military experience. Prior to the war, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) is a sharp-dressed hustler who seems conflicted about the carnal adventures of his sisters. He carries the pejorative nickname “Seven Beauties” because each of his siblings is unattractive. Pasqualino spends lots of time yelling at his sisters for their low morals, even though he’s a criminal. In one of the film’s many tasteless sequences, the dismembering of a corpse is played for laughs. In another, Pasqualino rapes a mental patient. If you’re wondering what the point is of watching a monster like Pasqualino, I don’t have a good answer for you.

          The protagonist’s wartime experiences are gruesome. Inside the concentration camp, he watches a rotund matron (Shirley Stoler) push inmates past their physical and psychological limits, then bonds, sort of, with a poetic activist named Pedro (Fernando Rey). That character’s ultimate fate is so vile as to approach the realm of perverse comedy. As noted earlier, the crescendo of the picture involves Pasqualino trying to gain favor with the matron through sex. Throughout Seven Beauties, Wertmüller devotes as much energy to provoking revulsion as she does to showcasing ideology. The sheer number of repugnant images and situations is distracting, as is dissonance between content and style.

          Like all of Wertmüller’s movies, Seven Beauties is beautifully photographed, and the production design is impressive. Moreover, frequent Wertmüller collaborator Giannini contributes his usual impassioned work. Seven Beauties is among Wertmüller’s most acclaimed films, having garnered accolades including four Oscar nominations, so, clearly, discerning viewers found much worth examining here. To these eyes, however, the picture has not aged as well as some other Wertmüller’s efforts. Seven Beauties speaks with more confidence than clarity, though a hint of the picture’s deeper meanings might come from Rey’s character, who claims that “a man in disorder is our only hope.” Disorder is something that Seven Beauties has in abundance.

Seven Beauties: FUNKY

Tristana (1970)

          An offbeat character study with elements of radical politics and romantic tragedy, the Spanish film Tristana was adapted from a novel by Bentio Péres Galdós’ novel by the acclaimed avant-garde director Luis Buñuel. French actress Catherine Deneuve, whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, stars as Tristana, a beautiful young woman with limited life experience who finds herself thrust into a new world after becoming an orphan. Taken in as a ward by much-older aristocrat Don Lope Garrido—who rebels against society by refusing to work, instead living off old money and the sale of heirlooms—Tristana is confused when Don Lope begins expressing romantic interest, but she accepts his advances out of a sense of obligation.
           Don Lope (played by Fernando Rey) does not insist on marriage because of his nonconformist ways, so when Tristana meets handsome artist Horacio (Franco Nero), a bizarre triangle emerges. Despite all his bold talk about personal freedom, Don Lope tries to enforce his economic, psychological, and sociopolitical claims on Tristana, which has the effect of pushing her further away. Then fate intervenes in cruel ways, creating unexpected complications that take the story from the pedestrian realm of domestic melodrama into the rarified terrain of literary irony.

          While Tristana forefronts issues of class, idealism, and political theory just as strongly as Buñuel’s other films, the movie can be consumed either as a sharp parable or as a simple human narrative. For example, Don Lope’s myriad proclamations about the role of the individual in society (e.g., “We’re happy because neither you nor I have lost our sense of freedom”) speak to Buñuel’s pet theme of preserving identity amid totalitarianism. Yet the proclamations also illustrate the self-serving worldview of a cad who wishes to justify his lascivious behavior. As a case in point, consider Don Lope’s perspective on work: “Down with work that you have to do to survive! That work isn’t honorable. All it does is fatten the exploiting swine. However, what you do for pleasure ennobles man. If only we could all work like that.”

          The catch, of course, is that Don Lope embraces his anarchistic principles when they help coax beautiful young Tristana into bed, and then sings a different tune when she meets an age-appropriate suitor. The X factor in the storyline is Tristana herself, whom Buñuel depicts as an innocent turned cynical and opportunistic by extended exposure to the avarice of man. (One can’t blame her for changing after hearing Don Lope spend years saying things like, “I’m your father and your husband—one or the other, as it suits me.”)

          Although Deneuve captivates with her magnetic screen presence and overwhelming beauty, it’s actually frequent Buñuel collaborator Rey who carries Tristana. He portrays Don Lope as a pathetic failure who hides behind a meticulous appearance and thunderous oratory. Once age and loneliness remove Don Lope’s armor, Rey shows the character’s sad vulnerability without mitigating Don Lope’s insidious qualities. (Costar Franco, an Italian whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, mostly gets lost in the shuffle.) Tristana moves along briskly and features several compellingly strange motifs, so while it lacks the edgy wit of, say, Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), it’s very much of a piece with the director’s myriad condemnations of the ruling class. Plus, on some levels, the movie is a good old-fashioned yarn about a woman trying to seize limited opportunities during an oppressive time—while appropriate for the feminism era, it’s also the type of story in which someone like Joan Fontaine might have appeared during the ’40s heyday of Hollywood “women’s films.”

Tristana: GROOVY

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

          One of Spanish director Luis Buñuel’s most acclaimed works and an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is not the easiest movie to penetrate—the story’s satire operates at such a sophisticated level that it’s easy to mistake some stretches of the narrative for straightforward psychodrama. Plus, as was Buñuel’s wont, the story loops around itself several times via tricky dream sequences and fake-outs that obscure what’s “really” happening. Yet for patient viewers willing to participate in Buñuel’s postmodern games, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie delivers a droll appraisal of the way feelings of entitlement blind the semi-rich to the absurdity of their own circumstances.

          The principal running gag of the movie involves a group of upper-middle-class friends attempting to get together for a dinner date. Throughout the story, outrageous events scuttle the plans—a restaurant holds a wake, complete with a corpse, during the dinner hour; a group of soldiers appears at a country house expecting entertainment and food; gun-toting gangsters invade a dinner party; and so on. The joke, of course, is that the protagonists are so preoccupied with creature comforts that they never lose their appetites—it’s as if the working-class people who interrupt the protagonists simply don’t exist. Meanwhile, Buñuel and co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière reveal the sordid activities of the main characters. A foreign ambassador (Fernando Rey) moonlights as a cocaine smuggler; a horny couple (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stéphane Audran) sneaks away from guests to screw in the woods; an underserviced housewife (Delphine Seyrig) has an affair with a family friend; et cetera.

          Even though The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie runs a brisk 102 minutes, Buñuel and Carrière cram a lot of narrative content into the movie—beyond the items already mentioned, there’s also a subplot about a sexy would-be terrorist and two strange sequences of people describing their dreams, which are depicted via surrealistic vignettes.

          Whether all of this material coalesces into a unified statement is a subjective matter, because the ambiguous final images could imply a heavy-handed theme of awful people stuck on a road to nowhere—or the images could imply something else. (Providing concrete answers was never Buñuel’s thing.) Appraising The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie by standard criteria is pointless, seeing as how the film does not aspire to realism, but it’s sufficient to say that Buñuel stocks the film with attractive women, debonair men, and elegant locations—these slick surfaces amplify the director’s ideas about a class preoccupied with materialism. One more thing: Because other viewers may have the same experience, I should add that that the discreet charm of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie escaped me on first viewing, but the more I thought about the movie, the more its aesthetic scheme—and its virtues—came into focus.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: GROOVY

Quintet (1979)

          If you’re looking for a provocative science-fiction parable exploring questions about the future of humanity, then stay the hell away from Robert Altman’s Quintet. For even though the picture is indeed an enigmatic drama about life in a frozen, post-apocalyptic wasteland, the story is so devoid of clarity and excitement that viewers who can stay awake through its entire 118-minute running time deserve a merit badge.

          Directed, produced, and co-written by Altman, the film tracks the odyssey of Essex (Paul Newman), a seal hunter who visits his brother’s family when there aren’t any seals left to hunt. Essex’s brother lives in one of five desolate compounds situated in a wintry wilderness, so when a mysterious assassin kills the brother’s family (and Essex’s pregnant companion), Essex wanders through the five compounds trying to discover why his brother was murdered (he’s apparently not so concerned about the pregnant companion).

          The conspiracy that Essex unravels has something to do with a game called Quintet, which is the only pastime still enjoyed by humanity’s survivors. This prompts a number of incomprehensible speeches by Quintet experts Grigor (Fernando Rey) and Saint Christopher (Vittorio Gassman), who opine that the significance of the number five in the game of Quintet reflects the meaninglessness of life. If that sounds bewildering, don’t worry—it doesn’t make any more sense in context, and the speeches are doubly confusing because Rey and Gassman both have thick accents.

          Quintet is either amateurishly underwritten or pretentiously opaque, but it’s hard to care which since the movie is so numbingly uninvolving, despite elaborate sets covered in fake ice and interesting camera angles photographed through frosted glass and other murky surfaces. The actors look bored and confused, the pacing is deadly, and the music is distractingly weird, with thundering drums playing over quiet scenes as if loud scoring can somehow generate excitement. Worst of all, the movie takes itself way too seriously, resulting in a monotonous vibe that hits viewers like a narcotic.

Quintet: LAME

The French Connection (1971) & French Connection II (1975)

          Cop movies were never the same after The French Connection, a scalding thriller about a New York detective obsessively tracking a Gallic drug smuggler. Once audiences watched morally challenged policeman Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) dress like a Salvation Army Santa Claus to snare a hoodlum, rattle suspects with twisted psychological tricks, and recklessly instigate the most frightening car chase 1971 audiences had ever seen, any subsequent policier with less verve seemed old-fashioned by comparison.

          Based on a bestselling nonfiction book by Robin Moore and directed with docudrama realism by William Friedkin, the movie meticulously tracks how Doyle and his partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), latch onto a small-time hood, Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco), who unwittingly leads the cops to enigmatic European crook Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Among many other things, the film is a respectful but unflinching homage to dogged police work, because surveiling Sol way past the point when superiors see the value in doing so unlocks clues leading to a much more significant target. Ernest Tidyman’s muscular script juxtaposes vivid character-development scenes with explosive sequences of police action, creating just the right ambiguous context for signature moments including the harrowing vignette of Doyle shooting an escaping felon in the back. Throughout, the storyline uses Doyle as a means of exploring of whether Machiavellian law enforcement degrades or protects society.

          Yet beyond its probing questions about right and wrong, The French Connection is breathlessly exciting, particularly during that infamous car chase, which has Doyle pursuing an elevated train carrying a suspect; Doyle’s near-misses with pedestrians are so terrifying that they reinforce the movie’s theme of a cop who’s arguably as dangerous as any crook. Lo Bianco, Rey, and Scheider provide sterling support, with Scheider demonstrating the streetwise suaveness that made him a leading man a few years later. As for Hackman, he’s on fire, alternately ferocious, funny, perverse, and wild, turning scenes like the “pick your toes in Poughkeepsie” interrogation into unforgettable moments. His performance is a master class in channeling the unique energy of the male animal into an expression of complicated sociopolitical concepts. Friedkin, Hackman, and Tidyman all won Oscars for their work, and they each spent much of their subsequent careers trying to recapture the bristling intensity of this film.

          For instance, Hackman continued charting Doyle dark odyssey in French Connection II, for which hard-hitting journeyman John Frankenheimer replaced brash provocateur Friedkin. A respectable thriller in its own right, French Connection II sends Doyle to Marseilles, where he tries to capture the evasive Charnier on the Frenchman’s home turf. In the sequel’s brilliant contrivance, Doyle gets abducted and by Charneri’s thugs, who force heroin into the cop’s system until he becomes a desperate junkie. This eventually leads to an extraordinary sequence of Doyle going through violent DT’s. Another strong moment is the grim finale, which pays off the French Connection journey on an appropriate note of moral ambiguity.

          Overall, however, the storyline of French Connection II isn’t nearly as focused or potent as that of its predecessor. The rivalry between Doyle and his Gallic counterpart (Bernard Fresson) plays well without lodging too firmly in the viewer’s imagination, and too many scenes feature Doyle killing time. As wonderful as it is to luxuriate in character development, leisurely pacing does not an exciting crime thriller make. That said, Frankenheimer plays rough whenever the action starts, and Hackman’s portrayal of Doyle is just as powerful the second time around. So while French Connection II ultimately feels unnecessary, it’s sufficiently well-crafted that both of these movies deserve spaces on the top shelf of ’70s crime cinema. FYI, the real-life cops who inspired The French Connection also inspired two other thrillers, both released in 1973: Badge 373 and The Seven-Ups.

The French Connection: OUTTA SIGHT

French Connection II: GROOVY