It's rare for filmmakers to continue to be productive at an advanced age and rarer still for the products of elderly filmmakers to be of high quality. By contrast, there are many examples of painters, writers, and composers who have contributed in major ways in their seventies and even eighties. Giuseppe Verdi, to cite just one example, wrote Falstaff when he was eighty years of age and it's considered every bit as fine a work as what he produced in midlife. Perhaps filmmaking is just too exhausting a profession to work for older folks. Or, perhaps its lucrative enough to make retirement that much more attractive. Luis Buñuel stands as the foremost example of a filmmaker who continued to shine and to expand his stylistic repertoire right up to his final film in 1977. He was seventy-four when he made the present film, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). It was his penultimate contribution. It's as original and revolutionary as anything that he (or any other filmmaker) could have made, even at an age of youthful iconoclastic experimentation.

Historical Background: Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), grew up in Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon, in Spain. At the University of Madrid, Buñuel took up with a close-knit avant guard circle that included Federico Garcia Lorca, Salvador Dali, and Morena Villa. These young artisans found inspiration in the surrealist movement that was active in France. Buñuel and Dali collaborated to produce a highly experimental film called Un Chien andalou (1928), while still students. The novelty of the film was enough to draw a commission from Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles for a follow-up. In the end, Dali contributed little to the second project (though he was generously credited with a share of the script). The result, Buñuel's second film, was L’Age D’Or (1930).

Buñuel's career was badly side-tracked by the advent of the Spanish Civil War. He had to leave Spain and ended up in for America for the next two decades, or so. In the United States, Buñuel could only find work on military documentaries and Spanish-language versions of Hollywood films. He had better luck in Mexico, in the early fifties, where his filmmaking career was revitalized. From 1950-1967, Buñuel made films in Mexico, France, and one in Spain. Many of those films are highly prized works. They often contained surreal elements, but were also built around conventional narratives. After Belle de Jour (1967), Buñuel lost interest in conventional storytelling (with the sole further exception of Tristana (1970), which adapted a novel). He began his deconstruction of narrative conventions in The Milky Way (1969) and then delved increasingly deeply into the subconscious with his final three films: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

Buñuel’s surrealism focuses on the subconscious mind. The principles by which the subconscious mind operates are quite different from those of the conscious mind. By definition, we have no direct awareness of subconscious operations. The subconscious mind is dominated by passions and drives, such as lust, anger, and hunger. It has no sense of time or space and makes no distinctions between imagination and reality. The subconscious mind is fundamentally irrational, knowing nothing of reason or logic. Whereas most films tell the stories of the conscious mind, Buñuel uses surrealism to recount stories of the subconscious mind. The Phantom of Liberty uses paradox, irrationality, hypocrisy, and the arbitrariness of morality and conventions as the primary tools for revealing subconscious influences on human activities. Buñuel was not so much a voice in the dark as a voice of the dark recesses of the human mind.

The Story: The Phantom of Liberty consists of a series of interconnected vignettes linked together in a daisy chain. Near the end of each segment, the camera shifts attention seemingly haphazardly from the central character of that segment to a minor one, who then becomes the central character for the next vignette. In one instance, the shift even carries the focus of the film from one time period to another.

The film begins with a shot of a famous 1808 masterpiece by the artist Goya entitled The Third of May, which depicts the execution of a group of Spaniards by Napoleon's army during the liberation of Toledo. Some of the Spaniards don't care to be liberated, preferring the stability and certainty of life under the monarchy, shouting "Death to liberty!" and "Long live chains!" Paradox: one person's liberty is another person's enslavement.

The camera now follows one of the French officers into a cathedral that the occupiers are violating by consumption of the communion wine and wafers. The officer, in a semi-intoxicated state, becomes infatuated with the statue of Doña Elvira, which sits on a sepulcher in the church. As he is about to kiss the life-size bust on its lips, the stone arm of the nearby statue of the woman's husband whacks the officer in the back of his head, knocking him out cold. The officer recovers and is determined to take his revenge on the offending Spanish statue. He exhumes the coffin of Doña Elvira, planning to have his way with her remains (ick!) in front of her husband's statue. When the coffin is opened, we are as shocked as the French officer to discover that the woman's body is fully preserved. She lies surrounded by the paraphernalia of her lifetime. Irrationality: distinctions between animate and inanimate, the living and the dead, and past and present are irrelevant to the subconscious mind.

Suddenly, we hear a query about the meaning of the word "paraphernalia." It is soon evident that the foregoing story from Napoleonic times was being read by one woman to another on a park bench in modern-day Paris. The reader, who is the nanny (Muni) for the Foucauld family, is spending an afternoon watching her young charge, Véronique Foucauld (I. Carrière), who is playing with her friend, Valérie, on the slides nearby. A somewhat lecherous man (Philippe Brigaud) approaches the girls in a sly manner and gives them some photographs, making them promise to show then only to their friends and not any adults. The photographs make the girls giggle and their eyes pop open. Back home, Véronique turns the cards over to her parents, Henri Faucauld (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Mme. Foucaud (Monica Vitti). They are outraged and, after Véronique leaves the room, a little bit titillated as well. Finally, we also get a view of the photographs and are surprised to discover that they are only tourist postcards of such places as the Madeleine, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffle Tower, Nôtre Dame, and the Sacré Coeur. The nanny is promptly fired for her negligence in allowing such filth to get the little girl's hands. Foucaud rearranges the framed spiders on his mantle, declaring that he's sick of symmetry. Arbitrariness of Social Conventions: What is art to one person may be obscene to another. Moral standards are somewhat arbitrary.

Henri Faucauld is having difficulty sleeping at night. He tosses and turns and finally just lies awake in bed. He is haunted by a series of strange dreams . . . or are they dreams? A rooster, a postman on a bicycle, and an ostrich successively pass through his bedchamber. The next day, Faucauld visits his doctor (Jean Champion), who declares him physically fit and that psychiatric problems aren't in his line, but that he could find a psychoanalyst to listen to his problems ad infinitum. Foucauld hands the doctor the letter left for him by the postman! Irrationality: The subconscious mind recognizes no distinction between dreams and consciousness or between fantasies and reality.

A nurse (Milena Vukotic) who works in the doctor's office interrupts Faucauld's visit long enough to ask the doctor if she may take some time off to tend to her ailing father. The camera now follows the nurse out the door. She is soon driving down a rural highway where she encounters some soldiers in a tank. They're on a foxhunt and want to know if she's seen any foxes. Arbitrariness of Morality: Shooting animals is called hunting but shooting people is called war.

The nurse continues on but soon has to stop at an inn because the inclement weather has caused a washout in the road ahead. The innkeeper (Paul Frankeur) is pleasant and accommodating. A group of four Carmelites Monks arrive at the inn and Father Gabriel (Paul Le Person) pays a visit to the nurse's room. He's got an image of St. Joseph and offers to pray for the recovery of her father. "Sometimes," he says, "faith succeeds where science fails." Soon, his three companions come round, as well, and the entire group strikes up a poker game, using religious medallions as poker chips: virgins are 10, sacred hearts 25, and scapulars 50. "I open with a virgin," says one. Hypocrisy: The moral pretensions of religious persons are often just skin deep.

A couple of late guests arrive at the inn, as well: a high school boy, François (Pierre-François Pistorio), and his middle-aged maiden aunt (Hélóne Perdrière). They've planned a tryst, away from the rest of their family, but she's having second thoughts, doubtless sensitive to the age difference, which in probably more than twenty years. The lad agrees to settle for just seeing her naked. She accommodates him to that extent and both he and we are surprised to discover that she has what could pass for the firm and fine body of a twenty-five year old. Irrationality: Beauty is in the mind of the beholder. What the subconscious mind sees is colored by passions.

Other guests at the inn include a flamenco dancer and her guitar-playing husband. Across the hall from that couple is another, Jean Bermans (Michael Lonsdale), a hatter by trade, and his associate, Edith Rosenblum (Anne-Marie Deschott). They are friendly folks and want to party. Jean encounters young François in the hallway and invites him to join Edith and himself for a glass of port, in their room. The nurse is also invited along with the four monks. It's a lively party with animated conversation, during which Edith disappears into the bathroom and changes into a dominatrix outfit. Then, Jean puts on a pair of seat-less pants, so that his derriere is fully exposed. The host and hostess return to the room where the others are chatting away and Edith proceeds to give Jean a wailing on his buttocks as he cries out, "Beat me again. I'm foul. A leper." The stunned guests beat a hasty exit, with Jean imploring, "Can't the monks at least stay?" Arbitrariness of Morality: One person's fetish is another's source of disgust.

In the morning, the nurse is back on the road to Argenton, but acquires a passenger in the form of a Professor (François Maistre) of the Police Academy, who had been breakfasting at the inn. The camera now follows the professor. As the professor approaches his classroom, the gendarmes are frolicking and misbehaving much like a pack of wild schoolboys. They've scribbled graffiti on the blackboard. As the professor proceeds with his lecture on anthropology, one of the lads cuts a paper doll, which soon ends up pinned to the back coattail of the professor's jacket. The professor also has to contend with an ever-changing group of pupils, as latecomers straggle in and some of those already present are called away to deal with target practice and traffic accidents. Finally, a gas main explosion empties the classroom except for two officers. Even then, the Colonel of the school has to be brought in to maintain order in the classroom. Arbitrariness of Social Conventions: We expect schoolboys to act up but police officers to be serious and officious.

One thesis of the professor's lecture is that conventions in various societies differ, but without conventions, the world would become a topsy-turvy kind of place. To illustrate the point, the professor tells a story. He and his wife, Elizabeth (Jenny Astruc), had gone to a reception. There were four others in the group: the hostess (Alix Mahieux), the host (Jean Rougerie), Mme. Calmette (Marie-France Pisier), and a little girl named Sophie (Maryvonne Ricaud). They had all sat down together around a table, for conversation, but, instead of chairs, this table was surrounded with commodes. All the guests had duly dropped their drawers or lifted their skirts for a little communal defecation. Among the tidbits of conversation, during this party, was the observation that the world's several billion people produce about 12 million tons of excrement every day. Sophie, bless her heart, had comported herself very nicely in the adult company except that she had committed a faux pas by mentioning out-loud that she was hungry. After a while, the Professor had gotten up and quietly asked one of the servants where the dining room was located. After locking the door for privacy, he had sat down, pulled open a table, pulled some food from a compartment, and begun to . . . well, I guess there's no other way to put it . . . eat! Sometimes one just has to answer nature's call. One of the women had knocked on the door, but he had duly informed her that the room was occupied. Arbitrariness of Social Conventions: Why is one natural bodily function a socially shared activity and respectable and another private or obscene?

Back at the academy, the last pair of officers is finally called away for traffic duty and the camera now follows them. Soon, they are pulling over a speeding vehicle driven by Richard Legendre (Jean Rochefort). He is duly chastened and then continues on his way to his appointment with Doctor Pasolini (Adolfo Celi). Dr. Pasolini advises Legendre that he needs to quit smoking or he'll be in for serious trouble. He also informs Legendre that he'd like to do a little exploratory incision – just to satisfy his "medical curiosity." It needs to be first thing the next morning. By plying the doctor for further details, Legendre gradually learns that he's got a liver tumor and it's in an advanced state. The doctor offers Legendre a cigarette to ease his anxiety. Legendre smacks the doctor across the face. Hypocrisy: Physicians can be expected to be about as healthy in their own lifestyles as priests are moral in theirs.

Back home, Legendre learns from his wife, Brigitte (Pascale Audret), that the headmaster (Agnès Capri) at their daughter's school had called to report that their daughter, Aliette (Valerie Blance), was suddenly missing. The Legendres rush to the school. The headmistress takes them to Aliette's classroom to talk with the teacher. The teacher reads the role call to illustrate how she had discovered Aliette was missing. When she gets to Aliette's name, Aliette duly stands up and responds. Her parents, the headmistress, and the teacher continue, however, to discuss her disappearance. Legendre insists that they'll have to go to the police and file a missing person report. Aliette accompanies her parents to the police station. The police officer proceeds to fill out the missing person report, several times asking Aliette herself for bits of information, about her age, height, weight, and so forth. When the form is completed, another officer is summoned and told to get right on the case. He closely examines Aliette so that he'll have a good idea what she looks like as he searches for her! Irrationality: We often don't see what is right in front of us because we are blinded by presumptions about where things ought to be.

The officer assigned Aliette's case is reprimanded, a bit, because his shoes aren't spotless. He stops by the shoeshine stand and the camera shifts to another customer, a polite, well-groomed young poet (Pierre Lary). The man turns out to be a killer-poet, however. He takes his rifle, complete with telescopic sights, up to an upper story of a skyscraper, which is under construction, and proceeds to pick off a number of pedestrians on the streets below, at random. Ultimately, he is arrested and put on trial. He is found guilty on all counts and the tribunal sentences him to death. As soon as his sentence is pronounced, his handcuffs are removed, the judges shake his hand, and he is released. Outside, gathered spectators request his autograph. Hypocrisy: Justice is about as just as healthcare professionals are healthy and priests are moral – which is to say, not very. Society tends to shower criminals with attention, making them instantaneous celebrities, and the more spectacular the crime, the greater the reward.

The Commissioner (Julien Bertheau) calls the Legendres to inform them that their daughter has been found. Naturally, Aliette accompanies her parents to the Commissioner's office for the news. The Commissioner is called away, in the midst of the meeting, and the camera now follows him. He makes his way to a bar, but whoever he's meeting there has not yet arrived. He spots a woman (Adriana Asti), in a nearby booth, who reminds him of his deceased sister. He asks to join her and begins to tell her about his sister. Before dying of miserie colie (which the Commissioner tells his new friend causes one to vomit excrement), his beloved sister Estelle (also played by Adriana Asti) had been an accomplished pianist. The Commissioner describes one hot summer afternoon when his sister, topless and wearing only black silk stockings and high heels, had played his favorite Brahms Rhapsody for him. The bartender (Philippe Brizard) interrupts to inform the Commissioner that he has a telephone call. It is from Estelle. The Commissioner is naturally dubious, his sister having been deceased for some time, but the caller knows intimate details about his life that only his sister could have known. The Commissioner immediately heads out to the family's burial crypt. He has to pull rank on the cemetery guard (Marius Laurey) to gain admission. In the family crypt, he finds his sister's coffin intact and the lid firmly nailed down, but there's a thick flow of hair sticking out from between the lid and box. As he attempts to pry the coffin open, a squad of policemen arrives and arrests him. This time, flashing his credentials does no good. He is turned over to the police chief, who pooh-poohs the Commissioner's claims of being the Commissioner. To reinforce the point, the chief calls the Commissioner on the phone and, later, takes the (premier) Commissioner to meet the (second) Commissioner (Michel Piccoli). Paradox: Without such restrictions as continuity of identity and role, we would lose all freedom of action. Too much liberty enslaves us or, as Janis Joplin put it, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

The meeting of the two Commissioner doppelgangers occurs just in the nick of time, as it turns out. There's a riot brewing at the zoo, where students and workers (those damn leftists!) are demonstrating. The two Commissioners put their heads together and decide to beef up the police presence. Just as they arrive at the zoo, gunfire, bells, and whistles begin to resound. All we see of the carnage, however, is the head of an ostrich, looking around in bewilderment, curly eyelashes aflutter, at the stupidity of homo sapiens. Hypocrisy: Humans, for all their vaunted intelligence, are the only species that systematically slaughters its own kind through warfare.

Themes: One of the central themes is inherent in the film's title: the elusiveness of freedom. Too little freedom is devastating but too much can be equally confining in its own way. Without attachments, associations, and cooperative efforts, we lose many of our options. The control that is imposed on our subconscious urges by laws, social conventions, and our own conscious oversight limits opportunities to satisfy some of our most basic impulses. Social and political anarchy, on the other hand, would give freer rein to those impulses but would increase constraints on our ability to satisfy goals and aspirations dictated in consciousness. That conflict is inherent in the structure of the brain, and society mirrors that structure. The tradeoff between conscious and subconscious aspirations ensures that freedom can never be more than an ethereal goal, unreachable in the absolute.

Another theme is the peculiarity of the subconscious mind, which Buñuel illuminates by exposing instances of hypocrisy, irrationality, arbitrary morality and conventions, and paradox. Specific examples of each are cited in the story section above. Hypocrisy, in particular, subsumes three of our most prestigious social institutions, by Buñuel's account: religion, the healthcare system, and the legal system. Comparing different cultures makes readily apparent the arbitrary nature of morality and conventions. Bare breasts are natural in the interior of Africa but immodest, if not downright illegal, under most circumstances, in developed countries. Polygamy is viewed differently in various cultures. The degree of relationship that defines incest varies from time to time and place to place. Even within a given culture, there are gross inconsistencies in moral standards, such as how killing is viewing in war or executions vs. homicides. Nature itself has no morality. The kinds of morality that humans dream up are only rational to a limited extent and, otherwise, arbitrary. We maintain existences that lie partly outside both the rational and arbitrary aspects of our own moral codes because our subconscious minds need room to breathe. Thus, priests sometimes sin, doctors sometimes light up cigarettes, and lawyers break laws.

A third theme on Buñuel's mind, for this film, is the operations of chance. It is by the chance intersection of various characters that we get from one scene to another. The gratuitous killer selects victims haphazardly. The odds against any one of us even existing are astronomical, considering how many combinations of sperm cells and ova could have resulted instead, at the moment when any one of us was conceived. Anyone who is born has already won the lottery once.

Production Values: Buñuel serves up a rich assortment of profane satire that is both provocative and just plain funny. Tactically, Buñuel uses mainly verbal humor, situational humor, sight gags, and surreal images for this film. Structurally, the film resembles a relay race, both in pace and segmentation. It was not the first film to use a series of vignettes linked by chance interconnections into a kind of chain. For example, Max Ophüls had used the technique with great success in 1950 with La Ronde. The method has been attempted more times than it's been successful.

I don't recall ever seeing a film that included so many different cast members that I recognized from other films. It's almost a Who's Who of the European acting talent of the time. There are over sixty speaking parts in the film and no one actor is present for more than a few of the vignettes. Jean-Claude Brially appeared in many French New Wave films. His resume includes Le Beau Serge (1958), Les Cousins (1959), Paris Belongs to Us (1960), A Woman is a Woman (1960), Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), The King of Hearts (1966), Claire's Knee (1970), La Nuit de Varennes (1982), and Queen Margot (1994). Monica Vitti is another headliner, who appeared in such films as L’Avventura (1959), La Notte (1961), and Red Desert (1964). Michael Lonsdale, who bared his buns in this film, appeared elsewhere in Stolen Kisses (1968), Murmur of the Heart (1971), Stavisky (1974), The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), and Moonraker (1979), in which he played Drax.

Adolfo Celi played Señor Mario De Castro in That Man from Rio (1964), Largo in Thunderball (1965), and Col. Alexander MacBibenbrook in The King of Hearts. Jean Rochefort and Paul Le Person are two of my old favorites from The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe (1972). Rochefort also appeared in The Clockmaker (1973), The Hairdresser's Husband (1992), and Ridicule (1996). Le Person was also in A Man and a Woman (1966).

Adriana Asti showed us almost everything she had, in this film. She also appeared in Accattone! (1961). Julien Bertheau was a Buñuel regular, appearing in The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Michel Piccoli has had a long career, in such films as French Cancan (1955), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Contempt (1963), Belle de Jour (1967), and La Nuit de Varennes (1982). Milena Vukotic, who played the nurse, also appeared in Nostalghia (1983).

Bottom-Line: This is social satire and black comedy at its best. Much of it is irrational – by design – but it's nonsense of the most delightful and precious kind. I don't think the kind of nonsense featured here is quite as rare today as it was when Buñuel made this film in 1974. It's the kind of fare featured in the skits of Saturday Night Live, for example. You need to have a taste for satire and absurdity to enjoy this film, but, if so, check it out. It's the work of a mature master craftsman at his best. The Phantom of Liberty is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 104 minutes. The Criterion DVD provides a pristine transfer, an introduction by co-scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière from 2000, the original theatrical trailer, and a twenty-two page booklet with an essay and an interview with Buñuel.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age