The Worst Film Ever

Fantastic!

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

'That Obscure Object of Desire' is Luis Buñuel's final film, and one of his best. Even at seventy-seven years old, Buñuel continued to tear-up the rulebook of cinema convention, opting instead for his own subversive, challenging and confrontational style of rebellious surrealism, in which he made all the rules.In 'Object', Fernando Rey plays a wealthy older man lusting after the much younger fiery Spanish beauty, Conchita. Buñuel's dark social satire always boasts a viciously hilarious joke: this time the joke is the concept of using two different actresses to play the same role but never acknowledging it, and switching them around arbitrarily, forming a dizzying mood. That Fernando Rey's character 'Mathieu' never notices his woman's changing physiognomy is the grand gag: Mathieu is so vain and self-obsessed in a privileged bourgeois manner, that he is in love with the idea of having a much younger, beautiful woman on his arm -- what she specifically looks like or who she is isn't especially important.Conchita accepts Mathieu's financial gifts but never sleeps with him -- even going to such extreme lengths as to wear a leather chastity belt in bed with him -- much to Rey's initial disappointment and, eventually, anger. After a large argument concluding with Mathieu throwing Conchita out of his house, the couple are eventually reunited by chance in Seville, much to their surprise and joy; but even then they are separated by symbolic iron bars -- the universe continues to hold them apart, even at their happiest moments (or is it Conchita that consciously holds them apart?). Despite Mathieu's stuffy vanity typical of the bourgeoisie when dealing with the poor, it's hard not to feel some sympathy for the naive older man being taken for a ride by the twin-headed manipulative commoner Conchita.Sexual anxiety and the eternal futility of lust have been a staple of Buñuel's film-making ever since his first feature, the legendary 'Un Chien Andalou'; indeed, Surrealism and the queasy weirdness of sex and sexuality have always gone hand-in-hand since the former's inception. The anxiety and fear of terrorism in this film is a metaphor for the sexual anxiety and psychosexual uncertainty of the characters. This theme of terrorism-anxiety makes the film extremely current and modern in 2017.The film's final joke arrives in its closing scene: the couple's long-awaited orgasmic consummation finally arrives in the form of a terrorist bomb explosion that kills both, while in the middle of one of their many arguments.

A fine film and brilliant swan song from the master who was almost 80 when he made this. Fresh and knowing yet unsurprisingly also amusing yet subversive as ever. Things begin innocently enough in a railway carriage with Fernado Rey regaling his fellow passengers with a jolly tale. Oh, except we have already had a terrorist explosion, the disappearance of his maid and there was that bucket of water. Co-writer, Jean-Claude Carriere tells in an most illuminating interview on the Studio Canal Blu-ray, that Rey is dubbed by Michel Piccoli and the two girls that play the single maid, both dubbed by a third girl. Otherwise everything is quite straightforward except that true love never runs smooth and the rich older man, played by Rey has great difficulty with the schizophrenic maid. Except she is not really schizophrenic, just sweet, caring and virginal in one persona and more astute, devilish and controlling in the other. Oh, and much though he might profess it I don't think it is 'love' on the old man's mind. Or on the girls' come to that. It is a simple tale told with more than a pinch of reality and a few seeming extraneous items like the recurring sack and a mouse and a fly. Great fun and far more serious than the gentle old man in the railway carriage would have us believe.

Luis Bunuel is the 20th century's greatest experimental filmmaker. From the dawn of silent pictures, Bunuel had been turning heads and shocking the establishment with his with his bizarre, incomprehensible cinematic ventures. He came, saw and perfected art filmmaking forever with the help of his friend Salvador Dali, on the historically acclaimed short shocker "Un Chein Andalou". The question is, with such fame achieved at such an early age, what more did he have to prove? The answer is much more. As an auteur, he continued to make some of the most interesting surrealists masterpieces of recent memory, like the Twilight Zone-type suspense thriller "The Exterminating Angel". Most of his films centered on one common concept, and that is Bunuel's subconscious fascination of human sexuality. How it controls us, and destroys us. We enter, his final picture, "That Obscure Object of Desire", and it is by far his most sexually fascinating film of all. It is a torturous exercise of patience, impotence and aggravation. In the end, he absolutely encapsulates in one movie, what the Heteronormative experience is all about. What we have is the story of a wealthy bachelor named Mathieu, played impeccably by Fernando Ray, as he recounts to a packed train car of curious passengers, his story of love lost. He has fallen for a beautiful woman named Conchita, who teases him with her graceful ability to flirt with him. For the first half of the movie, they end up following each other, and enter each other's lives as if cupid's arrow struck the both of them. With all this newfound attention, Mathieu is revved up and ready to make love to her. Yet, with every advance he makes, it is met with very adamant rejection from Conchita. He tries to use money to convince her mother to marry her, but that doesn't work. He successfully gets her into bed, unclothes her, and realizes that she has a chastity brace hiding under her gown. Time and again, he keeps getting shut out of sex, and eventually, he begins to lose control of his self-respect and moral boundaries. By today's standards, he would be accused of trying to rape the poor woman. What makes the case of Conchita so fascinating, is how controlling and cunning she is at Mathieu's advances, and as a female character, Bunuel constructs what is in essence, a feminist hero. Well, make that, heroes. What do I mean? It seems as if Bunuel has cast two different actresses to play the role of Conchita, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina. To my delight, and surprise I couldn't tell the difference. The casting of these two women were brilliant on the part of Bunuel, because they both represented Conchita with two strong and clever females, who drag Mathieu along through the entire film, and torture his sexual desires. Bunuel has always had a knack of portraying women as clever temptresses, like the scenes in "Au Chein Andalou" which portray the female character as fuel to the man's sexual fetishes, and yet get she gets the best of him in the end. One must ask the question of whether or not Conchita actually exists? Perhaps it's a figment of Mathieu's vibrant imagination. But does that really matter? She could be real or not real, in the end, Conchita is a metaphor for sexual perversity, and the ignorance of men. As with most of his films, Bunuel uses his surrealist imagery and story telling to convey a unique form of symbolism. One of the more unexplained and fascinating aspects of the picture was the ongoing crisis of domestic terrorism in France that occurred as the story of the two lovers was being told. The film so famously ends with Mathieu and Conchita dying in a bomb explosion. It was a head scratcher, indeed. But I concluded with something interesting, and that is that Mathieu and Conchita were leaving disaster everywhere they turned, and usually when there was a rift in the relationship. It felt that it was the universe trying to separate them from each other, as if Conchita's chastity wasn't enough of a deterrent. The film ends in a very unsettling fashion, as we see the couple shopping in a museum, not particularly happy with their relationship, but not particularly wanting to leave each other. It was almost as if the film itself had enough of such inane romantic indecisiveness, and just decided to end it all by killing them in an explosion. It was truly never meant to be, and Bunuel knows it. In conclusion, "That Obscure Object of Desire" is an affair not worth missing out on. It is the performances and storytelling that are the most attractive, and as his swan song, Bunuel knocks it out of the stratosphere, with explosions.

Cet obscur objet du désir or That Obscure Object of Desire marked the final film by Luis Bunuel. It is his cinematographic legacy and can be seen as a reflection of his production. It was totally an unexpected film by Bunuel. He had just made, according to himself, a trilogy (The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty) of films episodic in structure and with no direct plot. That Obscure Object of Desire was much more linear in structure but just as ambiguous and challenging.That Obscure Object of Desire is an astonishing piece of work and could easily be seen as Bunuel's finest film. Like most films by Bunuel, this film has a lot to offer and is open for several different interpretations. The film is multidimensional and has got many layers; social, political and erotic levels. This idea is reinforced by the parallel worlds Bunuel had placed in the film. The new world is the world of Conchita - the world of terrorism; Luis Bunuel saw terrorism as the biggest issue of our time, and was contemplating questions whether it was justified to kill innocent people to achieve justice. He was thinking about these issues seriously, and this contemplating has clearly reflected on That Obscure Object of Desire.Then there's the old world which Don Mathieu represents - the world which is disappearing. Don Mathieu tries to get in touch with the new world but can't and finds himself taking more and more distance to it. I shall depict this a little through an example. The scene where Conchita is having sex (actually faking) with his 'lover' and, let's Don Mathieu watch through the gate. First he stays there, then he leaves, but after a while comes back. He takes distance to the new world but can't let go of the object of his desire. This idea of two parallel worlds and Mathieu in between of the transition is reinforced by the fact that this film takes place in two different countries - worlds; Spain and France. This separation to two worlds is shown to the viewer in multiple images but one quite illustrating one is the picture where first, the camera films high skyscrapers - close to heaven, but then slowly lands down and reveals cranky shacks on the ground. This theme of dichotomy repeats in the character of Conchita who is played by two actresses. The two different actresses reinforce the emotional charge and elusiveness of Conchita. Carole Bouquet represents the cold, frigid side of Conchita and Ángela Molina the warm, sympathetic side. They represent two contrasts of the character and this highlights the theme of dichotomy. It was common to use one actor to play multiple roles, for instance Jean Marais is Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, but to use two actors to play one role was groundbreaking in the history of cinema and it worked, incredibly well. This elusive character also represents a very masculine perspective of women; volatile and treacherous. But to my mind it has nothing to do with Bunuel's own attitude, it just builds up the character, and Don Mathieu's Obscure Desire for Conchita; obscure because of the elusiveness of the character.The film portrays an artificial world, which Bunuel loved to portray as the world of the bourgeoisie. This theme was culminated in one of the most famous scenes in The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie; where the characters realize that their life is just an act, performed at a stage - their life's fake, show, only display. That Obscure Object of Desire is told through Mathieu's, at times interrupted, monologue; and at one point one of the fellow passengers takes a clear contact to the camera as he takes a look at us. This contact proves that there is a camera - fiction knows that it is fiction, film admits only being a film. The life of the characters is just a movie - just an act.The ending of That Obscure Object of Desire is quite fascinating and left open for interpretation. The film is Bunuel's cinematographic legacy where the circle of his production comes to an end - the music by Wagner in the ending is a reference to Bunuel's first film, An Andalusian Dog. There is certain realism in the aesthetics of Bunuel, not in the perversions, bruises or honest portrayal of violence but in the behavior of the characters, and the wounds done by the actions of them. In the films by Bunuel, there are many wounds torn but the characters always try to heal them by sewing (Belle de Jour, Diary of a Chambermaid). In the final scene of That Obscure Object of Desire Don Mathieu and Conchita see a woman sewing a bloody sheet. The woman is sewing the wound of the society, healing the wounds done by the characters, but also the wound of cinema - torn by Bunuel.After this, Don Mathieu and Conchita walk away from the woman and, suddenly the entire place explodes. Luis Bunuel adored Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) and it was one of his very favorite films. It's a film about Death who is tired of misery and agony - Bunuel was incredibly fascinated by this presence of Death and the communication with him. For Bunuel man could only live freely if he let's his life in the hands of coincidence, blind chance. But there is one inevitable destiny that awaits us all - death, in our bedroom or in the streets dominated by terrorism. The title of the film is obscure, elusive and indefinite itself and fits perfectly for this story with no end.