The surrealist scandal of 1930 and a compellingly ugly and unique experience ever since. An angry young Luis Bunuel (with Salvador Dali, who contributed to the script) douses Catholicism and bourgeois values in a toxic spray of scatalogical innuendo, sex, and dark humor. As a result, it enraged the press and public, got banned in France, and earned Bunuel the protests that he hoped for his previous film, Un Chien Andalou. All it took was a sharpening of his approach.
While the earlier work is intentional bewildering nonsense, this one takes unmistakable shots at unmistakable targets. It’s built to offend. It’s so unsubtle about it that it’s often funny. There’s even a simple narrative: a man and a woman keep trying to make love outdoors only to never finish.
He’s a government ambassador, she’s the daughter of party-throwing aristocrats. We first meet them as they roll around together in a mud puddle and a pack of dullards who hear her ecstatic screams run to separate them (as the man watches her being pulled away, he fantasizes about her sitting on a toilet). From there, we get a surreal rendering of blue-balled sexual frustration laced with depictions of society’s elite, who are so self-involved that they barely see their surroundings. They don’t notice flies collecting on their faces, they don’t notice when a kitchen catches fire a few feet away, they quickly forget a murder that occurs right in front of them—meanwhile, a little spilled wine on a suit is enraging. It closes with a quick battering ram of blasphemy: a bare bones visual summary of The 120 Days of Sodom starring Jesus Christ.
As an artifact, it hasn’t aged badly, but it has aged strangely. It’s hard to imagine anyone making a film like this today, a work that’s part manifesto and part art piece. It’s ragged and guerilla-style in everything from its look to its staging to its storytelling. Rarely does a film feel so much like an act of impassioned vandalism (as financed by art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, who also helped give the world early films by Man Ray and Jean Cocteau). A blank movie screen is a wall and this is Bunuel’s crude graffiti. Bunuel doesn’t care if you like it. He’d even kind of prefer it if you don’t.