| This is the final film of legendary surrealist filmmaker, Luis Bunuel. Drawing from a subject to which the director has dedicated much of his film career, That Obscure Object of Desire is a farcical examination on the puzzle of sexual politics. The opening sequence of That Obscure Object of Desire has come to define the surreal, sardonic humor of the great director, Luis Buñuel. Following a strangely hypnotising opening sequence against a backdrop of palm trees and exotic music Bunuel’s characters always do battle with erotic desire. They tend to be vain and fastidious people, middle-class, concerned with maintaining their self-respect. Yet they have a way of coming off second-best to lust, jealousy and an assortment of peculiar sexual obsessions. Wealthy aristocratic Mathieu (Fernando Rey) falls for Conchita (Carole Bouquet & Ángela Molina), a beautiful new chambermaid working at his home. He is wealthy, a gentleman, middle-aged, impeccably dressed, perfectly groomed, obviously respectable. She is Conchita: cool, elegant, gently mocking. Their life becomes a strange, erotic game of cat-and-mouse,…Mathiue Is gentle, polite, self-aware incapable of the superfluous gestures, and driven Buñuel appropriately structures the film in thematic cycles to symbolize the main character Mathieu's confusion, his relationship with Conchita is depicted in a series of breakups and reconciliations. Throughout the tortured romance between the two, absurdist undercurrents swell to the surface frequently in order to remind us that this is no straightforward tale of obsessive romance. Bunuel’s eye for the absurd and ear for the driest of witty dialogue keeps the pace up, even if the to-and-fro of their would-be relationship verges on the edge of tiresome. Perhaps the film is the ultimate anti-romance, with the relationship that develops between our protagonists causing nothing but endless problems for the completely besotted Mathieu thanks to the devilish designs of the beautiful but manipulative Conchita. |
