I love this movie so much

Overrated

Don't Believe the Hype

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL is a surrealist drama about a high class as social parasites, which are gathered in one place.After a visit to an opera, a group of fashionable people from high society has gathered at a party in a villa of a respected gentleman and his wife. However, their servants unaccountably leave their posts. The guests enjoy a luxurious and somewhat strange party. They notice, after dinner, that's all the servants gone, and that they can not get out of a music salon, even though all the doors and windows are open. The guests consume what little drinks and food are left from the previous night's party. Days pass, and their situation is complicated. They become hungry, thirsty, sick and hysterical...Mr. Buñuel has offered a strange display of human degradation, which has brought depression and hostility in a civil conflict. He has, through a surreal approach, manipulated with the characters, pulling out all the best and worst characteristics from them. An isolation is a mystery in this film. However, an isolation is a form of decision in the real world.Mr. Buñuel has showed us one of the characters of a privileged society, which is symbolically lost in its sole discretion. The story is a quite nervous and depressed, the pace is engrossing and transitions are explosive.Director's focus is on his people and situations in the society to which he belongs. This exceeds a surreal character and satire in this film.The acting is very good. I would mention Silvia Pinal (Leticia), as the voice of reason and realization.This is an unusual and frustrating game, which examines the patient with the audience.

A Bruñuel school's invitation is always becoming for any cinephile's reservoir, currently this film marks my fourth entrance into his territory after the lesser approachable THE MILKY WAY (1969, 6/10), THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL is an outstanding surrealism allegory, Bruñuel maneuvers a sleight of hand with sheer simplicity, the entire story is predominantly crammed in a living room of a regal mansion, the owners Lucía (Gallardo) and Edmundo (Rambal) host a dinner party for 20 middle-class guests. Bizarrely the party never ends, all of them, with the steward Julio (Brook) are incarcerated in the living room, whoever intends to get out of the room, will involuntarily alter his mind to stay, meanwhile for the people outside, the same mysteriously inexplicable force hedges them from entering too. Trapped in this claustrophobic space, the coexistence turns sour with time ruthless consuming the sustenance, the energy and the etiquette, simultaneously squabbles, vituperation, oneiric hallucinations, suicidal tendency and roughhousing all come to the fore (Bruñuel could go to extreme with cannibalism but he chose to refrain), the procedure of everyone takes off their facade and betrays their true self is excruciatingly riveting, the film could scale new heights as a superb probing essay on human nature if Bruñuel cared to exhume deeper to each character's meaty back-story (the fraternal hint, the flirtatious lady with terminal cancer, the undercurrent of adultery between the hostess and the Colonel, a votive trip to Lordes, the before/after reaction of taking the ulcer pills, not to mention the "La Valkiria" Leticia played by the first-billed Silvia Pinal, there are a slew of untold scandals are in need of elaboration). Instead the upshot is executed with a much murkier distinction, conspicuously they are all pawns in Bruñuel's storybook, it is rather an exacting task to distinguish all the different roles from a first-viewing, if only Robert Altman would do a remake, and expunge the political metaphor of the ending, then it would be transformed into a highly-watchable character analysis and an incisive farce with eye-dropping theatrical showpieces.Of course Bruñuel's mastery is omnipresent in the film, the superimposition shot of a clear sky upon a facial portrait, the outlandish amalgam of lambs and a baby bear, and the creative approach to offer a vent to let them out (a Paradisi's sonata is the turning point), until the climax, we all realize it is just a trial run, and the denouement is a dual indictment on undiscerning religious belief and the political status quo at then, pepped up with a palpable feeling of hopelessness. Also the slap to the bourgeois is loud and clear since the film's opening, it is the servants who are sentient of the pending uncanniness, and urge to leave the house as soon as possible, only the obtuse are being entrapped by the almighty trickster. Then what happens to the hoi polloi in the church? The purge is more generic or we should merely stop over-interpretation? Anyway who needs a concrete answer as long as Bruñuel is concerned.

'L'enfer c'est les autres' (Hell is other people), wrote the French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, in his play, 'No Exit' (sometimes referred to - and has been performed - as 'In Camera'), that surmised the narrative of three deceased individuals locked in a room, one that they eventually realise they will be spending eternity together in. Luis Bunuel used this simple meta-narrative concept of people trapped, to create one of his finest satires, and his first explicitly surrealist film since L'Age D'Or (1930). After Bunuel's previous film, Viridiana (1961), was condemned by the Vatican and banned in his native country of Spain (and where it was made), he moved back to Mexico where he had been making films throughout the 1940's and 50's, and produced a scabrous attack on General Francisco Franco's Spanish fascist dictatorship, and the institutions, and bourgeois facets of the country that were founded on the destruction of the poor and the proletariat, during the civil war that ended in 1939.Whilst the film works as political allegory, on a base narrative level, it functions as an irrational comedy; or farce. The guests arrive for a lavish dinner, but as they arrive, the maids leave, and progressively all the hired help leave them. Once dinner is complete, the guests congregate in the living room, but they all begin to realise that they are unable to leave the room at all. When this is discovered we observe that they attempt to go, but are either distracted or simply stop or break down at the boundary of the room. This continues through days, possibly months - the characters concept of time completely obliterated. The group falls into decay, primitive urges overwhelm them, and as this representation of Western Civilisation breaks down, the group become brutally savage, turning on the host of the dinner, demanding sacrifice. The group slaughter the lambs that were originally to be used in a dinner prank.At first the guests seem to simply ignore what is happening to them, and continue with inane chat. Exterior to the "party", the grounds are surrounded, but not even the police are able to enter, given the same mysterious barrier that prevents entry. It's almost a perfect parable, illustrating the ignorance of the Spanish bourgeoisie, as they strip the rights and dignity of the proletariat (here the maids leave on their arrival), whilst divorcing their minds from the violence and corruption of a dictatorship. But with this, it also shows how even the "civilised" sections of society, once they are stripped of their social status, their inherited manners of "education", and their ability to use wealth, the fall into absolute decay, probably falling apart greater than the lower classes, with their lessened moral outlook, and an almost infantile inability to deal with regular obstacles.Winner of the 1962 Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival, this was to begin what become (rather belatedly for the 62 year old) his most productive, celebrated and interesting period of his career, based in Paris, beginning with Belle de Jour (1967) and ending with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). This is the period that he developed and expanded his own style, and his unique vision on film. The Exterminating Angel has also given inspiration for others. It is a clear influence on Jean-Luc Godard's wonderfully bleak and satiric depiction of the bourgeoisie and the end of Western Civilisation, Week End (1967). The idea was also utilised in one sketch from Monty Python's Meaning of Life (1983), that saw the guests leaving as ghosts. This is by far, one of his greatest achievements, beautifully realised, with comic touches, and moments of surrealism that both bemuse and amuse.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Bunuel's 1962 film revolves (almost literally) around a group of middle-class people at a dinner party. This theme would be explored further in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie but works better in his earlier piece. The premise of the film is playfully simple. The guests of Nobille are trapped in a room at the end of the evening unwilling or unable to leave. That's it. Until the third reel of the film when the epilogue gives us another context in which to view the previous 80 minutes worth of action.The characters are placed within this Kafkaesque narrative, seemingly of their own accord at first. There is no barrier to the next room yet no one can pass its borders. There is no science-fiction at play here, more an existential angst keeping them from what lies beyond. Some of the players half-heartedly try and make their escape but some give-up without trying or stall at the last, crying, unable to move further. Their predicament is not one of comfort either, there is death, starvation and thirst within the group and their ordeal goes on for weeks. Occasionally Bunuel brings the audience out of the room and we see people on the outside staring at the house with as much perplexity as those trapped inside. A rescue attempt is made but again, no one really tries to just walk in, open the doors and let the poor wretches out.What are we to make of the situation. Obviously there is a metaphor that Bunuel wants us to read. Is it a simple case of the middle classes being trapped within their own understanding of the world, with the desire to understand other kinds of people merely an act of lip-service to their supposed ideals? Is it a comment on the Spanish Civil War whereby those on the streets were forced to fight as the middle classes ate their lamb? The ending reveals more than I will say but I think this is Bunuel's best film of those I've seen and it is a crisp, timeless watch which asks more questions than it answers.