The Phantom of Liberty

You've got to hand it to Luis Buñuel: at the age of 75, the foremost surrealist of 20th-century cinema hadn't lost one bit of his irreverent wit. With 1974's The Phantom of Liberty, Buñuel capitalized on the Oscar-winning success of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, re-teaming with his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, to conceive yet another outrageous assault on bourgeois convention. This time out, the idea was to completely dispense with conventional narrative storytelling by stringing together a series of vignettes, seemingly unrelated yet united by Buñuel's singular knack for absurdity as an expression of his defiant artistic freedom. Going a step or two further, Buñuel would yank the viewer out of some stories just as they seemed to be resembling a "normal" movie, shifting into the next non sequitur playlet to indulge his favorite themes with the refracted logic of dreams. And so we have absurdities piled on like a layer cake, as many scenes twist our expectations: dinner guests sit on toilet seats and then eat in the privacy of a bathroom (make that eating room); worried parents report their missing daughter to the police, but the girl is right there with them all along; a quartet of monks play poker using religious medals as chips, while a couple performs S&M sex-play in the same room; and so on. It's safe to say that many viewers will be mystified by The Phantom of Liberty, which is a hit-or-miss affair that embraces paradox but is rarely as "uproarious" as many critics claim. Still, this one's certainly worthy of its classic status among Buñuel's late-career films, and the DVD release features a fine transfer, as well as an illuminating introduction by Carrière (taped in 2000), and an informative 32-page booklet. Recommended for larger collections. (J. Shannon)