The Phantom of Liberty (1974, Luis Buñuel) (Patreon)

59/100

Second viewing, last seen 2002. Might seem odd to some that I'm so lukewarm, given that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Buñuel's previous surrealistic satire, is among my top 20 or so films of all time (rating: 97/100). That's kinda the problem, though: This plays very much to me like an effort to replicate something sui generis, and largely seems wanting by comparison. For one thing, there's no controlling conceit—Discreet Charm's variously interrupted meals, while functioning primarily as a running gag, nonetheless provide crucial scaffolding that prevents the movie from resembling, as this one often does, a grab-bag collection of almost Python-esque sketches (albeit much more scathing and deadpan than Python generally were). More than that, though, Buñuel was just running short on inspiration, content to serve up glib ironies and shallow reversals of expectation. In the former category, I'd include pretty much the entire hotel sequence, with its monks who speedily descend into vice upon spying a deck of cards (I like Viridiana considerably more than I once did, but religious hypocrisy, as a target, tends to bring out Buñuel's fish-in-a-barrel side) and its incestuous weirdness. And while one switcheroo works splendidly, as I'll concede in the next paragraph, we also get extremely labored bits like the scandalous photos that are finally, after interminable setup, revealed to be architectural rather than pornographic in nature. I confess that I'm not confident about what Buñuel "means" by this incongruity, if indeed he means anything at all, but it's the joke's inevitability (we're just waiting to see what non-sexual subject it'll be) combined with its protracted prelude that's deadening. Shaggy dogs are only effective when you aren't hyper-conscious of their shagginess.

Apparent non sequitur: I'm less keen than are most people on The Big Lebowski and Inside Llewyn Davis, and for the same inexplicable-to-others reason: To me, both of those films are hilarious for about an hour (with Lebowski a serious contender for my favorite comedy of all time), then abruptly fall off a cliff and become barely amusing at all for their final 45 minutes or so. I'm aware that you violently disagree with that assessment. Doesn't matter. Point is, I perceive a switch that's thrown just past the midpoint, cleanly dividing the film into superb and meh. And the same thing very nearly happens in Phantom of Liberty, except reversed: Here, everything terrific has been corralled into the second half, following nearly an hour that does little or nothing for me. It's really just two scenes plus one gloriously goofy detail, and I'm afraid that I can no longer take any pleasure at all in the mass-shooter sequence, which America's insane gun culture has rendered retroactively more commonplace than absurdist. (Not the film's fault, but it can't be helped.) But the dinner-party scene that swaps gustatory and excretory rituals—shitting's done communally during polite conversation, while eating is so taboo that one speaks of it in whispers and locks oneself into a designated space to partake—constitutes peak Buñuel, making a startling observation about societal norms while at the same time continually adding layers to the comedy (as opposed to the aforementioned obscene-photos bit, which is just a long-delayed punchline). And that leads almost directly into Phantom's finest and sharpest satirical episode, in which various adults search for a little girl who's right there in front of them, shushing her each time she attempts to call their attention to her presence. Entire essays could be written about the ways that this ostensibly silly and quite familiar gag (I could probably find several dozen more concise examples—usually it's just one "Quiet, Billy, we're looking for Billy," followed by a sheepish double take) digs into the oft-troubling disparity between actual children and our blinkered conception of children. Were the entire film at that dizzying level, or even most of the film...well, you'd have The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, basically. Which also boasts a perfect ambiguous ending, rather than more or less cribbing one that Buñuel had already used for The Exterminating Angel (with some avian mystery thrown in, but Stroszek this ain't).

Oh, and that one gloriously goofy detail? The police commissioner's saga isn't strong enough overall to support my "first half feeble, second half masterful" position, but I did once again bust out laughing when he rushes to the cemetery after receiving a phone call from his dead sister, examines her coffin, and then reaches into an area to its left, blocked from our view, and pulls out a telephone handset, seemingly connected to nothing. First-rate logical nonsense, that.