Review #115: 'The Phantom of Liberty' (1974)

Luis Bunuel's penultimate film focuses on the uncertainty of chance, as well as blending his own experiences and dreams with his surrealistic ideals. The majority of the focus centres around a hotel where a collection of bizarre characters interact and cross path to strange and sometimes hilarious outcomes. Some of the key scenes involve a sniper picking off random people from a tower window only to be congratulated for his acts, a dinner party where the group gather in the toilet for discussion and excuse themselves to eat on their own in the dining room, and a couple set up a search party for their 'missing' daughter who is with them the whole time (even helping fill out her own missing persons form).

As mentioned, The Phantom Of Liberty is all about the importance of chance and the inevitability of fate. The characters exist or meet under unusual circumstances, and seem to be just go through the motions, resigned to their existence. It is also a mockery of social order, and how this collection vast array of different characters - monks, the police, the military, teachers, sexual deviants, the bourgeois, doctors - all seem to clash because of the place society has dictated they are to be. This is usually to great comic effect, and sometimes to a slightly tragic one. Mainly this is the case in a scene where a doctor hesitates to tell his patient that he is dying from cancer, and eventually tells him matter-of-factly in an almost humorous way. This scene was based on Bunuel's own experiences of being told he has a liver disorder, which he tragically died from in 1983.

Bunuel's films are usually very funny, but not in the laugh-out-loud way. He usually pokes fun at the bourgeois in a cunning manner, and sets up bizarre scenes of surrealism (to the greatest effect in The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972), which in my opinion is his finest film). But he seems to be at his most free-spirited here, and the funniest moment has to be when a couple hosting a group of monks in their hotel room begin to change their clothes - the women puts on a leather dominatrix outfit, and the man reveals he is wearing arse-less pants - and commence a spanking ritual much to the monks utter horror.

It may be the funniest, but it's also Bunuel's least accessible film. Obviously Bunuel was less concerned with making it easy for the audience than to express himself artistically, but I found this a hard film to completely connect with, similar to the way I felt with Peter Greenaway's A Zed And Two Noughts (1986). Some scenes I felt didn't work - especially the scene where the couple is searching for their missing daughter. They interact with her, and the police even interview her to get a physical description. It is quite a long scene, and the joke wears thin pretty fast. That said, it's certainly one of Bunuel's more interesting films, but doesn't quite match up to his best work.


Directed by: Luis Buñuel
Starring: Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy
Country: Italy/France

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie