One of my several regrets of current cinema is the tunnel vision of most young filmmakers, who are too preoccupied with emulating the most visually, immediately obvious great directors; the directors who have a clear, applause-ready style. There are plenty of Scorsese and Kubrick disciples, but where are the wannabe Lubitschs, or Sturges(s), or Renoirs, or Ashbys, or Altmans? Where are the new directors who’re willing to put the movie entirely first, at the risk of delayed gratification, of not having their poster grace college dorms across the country?
Luis Buñuel, while infamous and legendary for images such as the sliced eye in Un chien andalou, or the opening fantasy of Belle de jour, or the general disdain for social contrivances that governs his work, is another filmmaker who seems to be unfortunately under-acknowledged by the new generation. Buñuel is subtler than a greatest hits reel of his filmography might imply – his sure, unfussy command of surface craft seduces you, lulls you, before gently sliding in with a pin prick of a black joke that pops a convention before swiftly/gracefully moving on to another pressure point. I went through a great deal of Buñuel in college, but The Exterminating Angel and Simon of the Desert, for some reason, had always eluded me. Naturally, Criterion comes to the rescue again.
Now that both have been in the social consciousness for years, The Exterminating Angel plays, as many have written, as a companion piece to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie followed a group of bored, rich socialites as they pursue a meal that, for increasingly desperate reasons, never materializes. I have read that Bourgeoisie is Buñuel having fun, but Buñuel, even at his most critical, usually seemed to be having some sort of fun – the merge of the despairing macabre and the outraged with his dry cocktail hour wit is one of the many reasons why his work is so hard to shake. A constant trick of the war movie, or the cops-n-robbers movie, is to have a character, either supporting or principle-in-need-of-redemption, blithely, numbly comment on an appallingly gory casualty (normally as we gaze upon said casualty). Buñuel’s seemingly offhand mastery has the same effect – he shocks you with a casual outrageousness.
Buñuel is too much of an artist to editorialize; his characters are allowed to be recognizably human: we can share in, and relate to, their immediate pleasures without a built-in reaction, and still be repelled by them in equal measure. The Exterminating Angel, however, takes Buñuel closer than usual to characters-in-service-of-a-preordained-thesis, though that may be unavoidable given the premise: a traditionally privileged-vapid collection of largely middle-aged something’s struggle to escape a dinner gathering that never properly reaches its conclusion (the dinner-goers, after a strange repetition, suffer a kind of spiritual paralysis, unable to move on from a room in the host’s home to whatever socially sanctified inanity that may follow). The dinner party is trapped, for days ongoing, reduced to hunting animals that occasionally pass by (the most haunting image) and to stealing away in corners for private bits of romantic business. The Exterminating Angel is bleaker than most Buñuel pictures I’ve seen, because the usual pleasures that damn the characters this time exist on the periphery; we see only the torment, the end to their means, we are trapped.
And that confinement, intentionally, strangles the film. The Exterminating Angel is essentially a one-joke movie, a good joke, but a joke that, particularly if you’re familiar with the director, carries less surprise. The characters are largely interchangeable (again intentionally) and we’re left waiting for some variation of the inevitable to eventually happen. The Exterminating Angel is powerful, on the most primal level it recalls that self-loathing we feel when we’ve over-stayed our welcome somewhere and drank and eaten too much; it connects to that sensation, the morning after, of a cosmic imprisonment and pointlessness. But Buñuel, to court ingratitude, and to risk damning the picture with the faint praise that it’s only a good movie, took this material further both earlier and later in his career. The Exterminating Angel blows its poker face, is clearly angry, and that anger clouds that contradictory benign/sideways-disgust that is so unnerving in Buñuel’s best films.
Simon of the Desert, released three years later in 1965, (right before Belle de jour, another masterpiece) as part of an anthology that never gelled, is one of those best films. The picture, just 42 minutes, concerns the plights of Simon (Claudio Brook, also of Angel), a fifth century man who climbs a pillar in the middle of the desert to atone for sins never specified, to become closer to God. Naturally to Buñuel, Simon attracts everyone except the Man Upstairs: common and religious folk and Satan, who takes personal offense to Simon’s seemingly hypocrisy-free intentions. Satan, played by Silvia Pinal (from Angel and Viridiana) in the manner of vain, proud acclaimed-European-director-arm-candy, attempts to lure Simon from his perch with promises of school girls and, more tempting, of Christ’s approval. Simon, whose vanity is his desperation for purity (a nice touch: unsatisfied with starvation – he begins standing on one leg), battles Satan while bestowing the townspeople with miracles they value as little more than circus acts. A man has hands restored to him and walks away ungrateful, unrelieved, striking his little girl. Simon of the Desert has an incidental feeling of futility that’s lighter and more awful than The Exterminating Angel; Buñuel reduces the classic battle of good and evil to farce, to kids playing in the backyard. The much discussed finale, finding Simon whisked off with Satan to a contemporary New York disco, transformed as a hipster bohemian, drinking and watching the girls dance – defeated, aloof, deflated; completes this view. Some have taken this ending has a throwing up of hands on the part of Buñuel, after money limitations blocked another ending, but this conclusion is one of the filmmaker’s most damning correlations: religion is as casually discarded as anything else, a sign of the times, as feeble a form of soul-medication as anything likely to occur to the young things shimmying on the dance floor. In these moments, Buñuel, one of the greatest filmmakers, achieves true terror-comedy.
