Word: bunuel
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...this problem, is generating fresh breezes across the face of music. And when their successes and failures are recognized, young people will no longer approach classical music through Beatle allusions and electric disembowelments; they will come to music as the most sensitive come to a film by Godard or Bunuel, because they must, because they wish to speak...
...rhetoric and relies instead upon demonstration, letting the events speak for themselves. One cannot find Bergman in his latest film, except those parts of him that are specifically general to all of us. He is mature enough to spare his viewers any murky idiosyncracies, as we sometimes see in Bunuel, and yet his firm talent shapes our understanding without fanfare or the crassness that sometimes mars Godard and Fellini. In the final analysis, it is his resolute humanity that breathes so wonderfully from this new film, a simple sincerity in dealing with the difficulty and complexity of being human...
...This excludes films shown only at the New York Film Festival; it also excludes films that arrived in Boston in 1968 but opened elsewhere in 1967 (Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers). To make things simpler, I eliminate European films made over two years ago but released during 1968 (Bunuel's Nazarin and, regrettably, Godard's masterpiece Pierrot...
Belle de Jour, a very willful fantasy by Luis Bunuel compensates for its personal eccentricities by being so tolerant of the perversions of its characters. Raymond Durgnat (I think) points out that Bunuel's preoccupation with fetishist love differs little from, say, Max Ophuls' preoccupation with sentimental romance--that all forms of love are pure, and identical in the eyes of whatever strange God Bunuel worships. Belle de Jour is a film-maker's film, uncompromisingly unclinical, its often shocking material bathed in the warm yellow-brown glow conveyed by sensuous moving shots...
...Bunuel's own vision (apparent in the strange premature glimpse of the wheelchair and the ever-present emphasis on feet) draws us into the world of Severine's life and fantasies. Though Belle de Jour boggles the mind the first time around (audiences tend to dwell on peripheral ambiguities), the structural integrity becomes increasingly clear on repeated viewings (well worthwhile) and ends up simpler than many of Bunuel's other films; Bunuel's insight and humanity far transcends the realm of social allegory for which he is duly famous (Viridiana, Exterminating Angel). But this simplicity is sensed rather than understood...