The Discreet Charms of Luis BuñuelAuthor(s): George RafaelSource: Cinéaste, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2000), pp. 32-33Published by: Cineaste Publishers, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41689229 .

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of admirers that he "should like to make even the most ordinary spectator feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds." The twist on Panglossian wisdom was not only a tip of the cap to a kindred spirit, Voltaire - another renegade Jesuit - but also typical of his skeptical nature. For the Buñuel that this late audience came to know and love was Don Luis, festival favorite, the gentlemanly author of such delightful gems as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Two actresses playing the same role? Ingenious! Elegant BCBGs unable to get a bite down - on rit comme des fous! The old trouper made you feel so good strolling out of the arthouse, so devilishly clever, as if he'd let you in on a private joke - what a brilliant discovery! And at his age, too!

What these admirers were perhaps less aware of was the darker side of Buñuel's genius, never mind their sitting through midnight double features of Un chien andalou (1929) and VAge d'or (1930) at uni- versity, a rite of passage akin to imbibing

deep drafts of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche or dancing till dawn. A girl's-school boho I knew used to screen Discreet Charm as the visual background to her dinner parties. Cool.

It's hard to imagine, then, the outrage inspired by VAge d'or when it premiered - right-wing extremists attacking the cinema, demonstrations, a near riot, the Pope threat- ening to excommunicate the film's produc- er, the arts patron le Vicomte de Noailles. (Seventy years on, the film's ending, with the revelation of Christ presiding over an orgy, still has the totemic power to shock.) Or Land Without Bread (1932), Buñuel's devastatingly ironic travelogue of Las Hur- des (a backward region of Spain), which forced Madrid to undertake aid programs out of shame; they also banned the film. Or Los Olividados (1950), his neo-realistic film about Mexican slum kids - the genre's tem- plate, from Hector Babenco's Pixote to Boaz Yakin's Fresh - that revitalised his career and drew official censure (Octavio Paz wrote a famous essay in praise of the film and Buñuel). Or my special favorite, Viridi- ana (1961), his triumphant return home after twenty-two years of exile, with its beg- gars banquet as Last Supper send-up that's

been copied numerous times, from Altman's M*A*S*H to 'Sensation' artist Sam Taylor- Wood's trite videos.

Sadly, the question isn't which Buñuel is better or more meaningful - the agent provocateur, the French master, the Palmes d'Or/Oscar winner - but who, other than a few hoary old cinephiles and Surrealist scholars, will pay him homage today, on his centenary? (Aside from a continent, a penin- sula, and a clique - the Spanish-speaking world and Cahiers du cinéma - that is.) When I proposed this appreciation to my editor at a leading online magazine, he demurred, saying that while he personally loved Buñuel it was no go, there'd be no general interest. About the closest cyber surfers got to 'art' films these days were the so-named 'indies,' most of which are actual- ly underwritten by Hollywood. What's more, it was too soon after the Hitchcock centenary; one dead director was enough; besides, everybody recognized Hitch. Why, a new Psycho was released just last summer!

Not a word on a man who is one of the two or three greatest directors in the history of cinema, who crafted a dozen or so mas- terpieces, several under the most trying con- ditions. Que vergüenza , as my grandfather

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used to say. There's really no reason why dot.com-

munards should care about old movies, much less old movies that aren't even in En- glish. Reading subtitles is such a drag and poor Don Luis did have the misfortune of plying his trade in such cinematic backwa- ters as France, Mexico and Spain, terrae in- cognitae to increasingly insular moviegoers.

Come to think of it, it's a miracle any of Buñuel's films are shown here. His was an uneasy relationship with God's Country. First, swept up by MGM following the succès de scandale of V Age d'or, ostensibly to learn filmmakingO), only to be thrown off the set of a Garbo picture (she wanted to be alone); he quit MGM for good thereafter. Years later came a film curator's job at the MoMA in the 1940s, which he lost after it was revealed that he was the 'Antichrist' respon- sible for VAge d'or! A big blow for the penni- less refugee. (His former friend Dalí didn't help matters any by suggesting that Buñuel was a Red in The Secret Life of Salvador Daliy another one of his many paeans to himself.) Thence Warner Bros., where he scraped by as a dubber, his career a thing of the past, his films barely remem- bered, an invisible man. America was hardly the land of opportu- nity.

Of the two films he made with partial American backing, only the second, The Young One (1960), was shot on native soil, off the coast of Georgia (the first, The Adventures of Robinson Cru- soe [1952], is noteworthy for its surrealist touches and lurid col- ors). In his treatment of the 'race problem,' Buñuel did something hitherto unheard of: he added shades of gray to a black and white canvas. A racist warden capable of the vilest lynchings and the tenderest acts of human kindess; a black prison escapee, falsely accused of rap- ing a white woman, who isn't noble à la Sid- ney Poitier; the very young "fifteen will get you twenty" girl seduced by the warden who turns out to be something of a slattern are Southern Gothic grotesques (via Peter Matthiesen's novel, Travellin Man ) made flesh by Buñuel's steady hand, none entirely sinner nor saint. All very paradoxical, all very Buñuelian, poised uneasily on the fine line separating pathos and absurdity, a curio, out of sync with mainstream Holly- wood but not quite part of the European tradition either. Yet a film so unconvention- al and daring could only have been made by an outsider with blood in his memory. (Renoir's The Southerner and Swamp Water and Laughton's The Night of the Hunter , all similarly dislocated and compelling, also don't fit into any easy catagory.) Unlike so many dated 'message' films from the period, The Young One gets under the skin; truth, justice, and the American Way are not seen

to triumph. Most disconcerting. You could say a cozy ambiguity, an arm-

chair amorality, are Buñuel's dominant traits. He declines to pass judgment or feign omniscience; in an indifferent universe, his characters are free to bind themselves as they wish. It's a stoic temperament verging on cynicism, guaranteed to rub right-think- ing people - of whatever persuasion - the wrong way. For the masses wanting an evening's entertainment, it means no happy endings or satisfying resolutions, no good guys and bad guys, but then Buñuel is the least sentimental or formulaic of directors. For the chattering classes, it's a matter of not pandering to preconceived notions or party- lines, or to stereotypes positive or negative, or - maddening, this - to passing fancies. (The youthful audience that fell for the Don Luis of Discreet Charm would find little to like in Simon of the Desert (1965), where Hell is on this earth with Fenders twanging.)

Further to that, around the time of Cela s'appelle l'aurore (1955), Buñuel's rather poetic 'love-yes-police-no' film set on Devil's Island, Eric Rohmer attacked him in print and in person as mean, irreligious, and unoriginal. Years later, the late Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar - Rohmer's diamet- rical opposite in every way - accused Buñuel in The Milky Way (1968), his amusing and very underrated meditation on Church his- tory, of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, claiming that it was funded by the Vatican! All I can say is that any director who can get up the noses of such very differ- ent personalities must be doing something right.

That the young firebrand who said of Un chien Andalou that "those foolish people who have been able to find the film beautiful or poetic when at bottom it is really a des- perate and passionate call to murder," should rue the bad manners and slovenli- ness of the youth movement, pop music, terrorism (which he associated with nihilism; the explosions and incidents in Obscure Object are his tart 'signs of the

times'), pornography (as opposed to eroti- cism), and the pi certainties of ideologues, comes as no surprise - you can't be an angry young man or épateur forever (you'd become a boring old fart). Buñuel, though, seldom wavered in his surrealist beliefs or progressive ideals despite the disillusion- ments he later admitted to, he merely toned them down as experience dictated. He didn't, to his credit, become smugly bour- geois or reactionary as so many old men do, like my Loyalist supporting/Franco hating grandfather who became a Reaganite in his dotage because "el tiene sus pantalones puestos!" Buñuel, an Aragonese, exemplified old world dignity: All possible politeness, even to the worst of enemies. "Thank God I'm still an atheist!," this Jesting Pilate would say, tweaking his Dominican and Jesuit friends.

The invisible man remains, stubbornly, part of cinema's lexicon. The expression

Buñuelesque , however, has come to mean anything that's just a bit off or weird. By that notion an overblown fraud like Tim Burton is called Buñue- lesque.

When I think of the Buñue- lesque, I think of the snickering 'Savior' shaving in The Milky Way , or the startling jump cuts that punctuate the fascist march at the end of Diary of a Cham- bermaid (1963). There's the young woman dying of plague in Nazarin (1958) who, rejecting the last rites, whispers, "Cie/o, no; Juan , si!" ( Juan arrives in time to kiss her, and himself, adieu). There's the sharp, eye- ball-slicing razor cut of Un chien Andalou , which, for some rea- son, always makes me turn away.

The Buñuelesque is detectable in the works of such disparate talents as David Lynch, Robert Altman, Carlos Saura, Pedro Almodovar, and Victor Erice. (The vast shadow Buñuel casts over Spanish and, by extension, Latin American cinema, cannot be overstated.) And although the Buñue- lesque isn't commonly associated with his work, Chabrol is the one director who comes closest to capturing his sardonic fla- vor.

Still, the Buñuelesque, like the Lubitsch touch, is elusive, inimitable; conscious attempts to evoke the Buñuelesque are self- defeating. Like a few select pantheon direc- tors - Dreyer, Vigo, Ozu - Buñuel is sui generis. There is no school.

So, since no one seems that keen on toasting Don Luis on his hundredth this 22 February - which is also, coincidentally, the birthday of 'the Father of Our Country' (what would Buñuel have made of the ax and the cherry tree, never telling a lie, wood- en teeth and George's big bum? I laugh thinking.) - I shall. With a Buñueloni, natch. Caballero! M

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) kneels beside "the crown of thorns, the nails and the hammer of the Crucifixion" in Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961).

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