Word: bunuel
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BELLE DE JOUR. Aging but still arch, Spanish Director Luis Bunuel has filled this piece of baroque pornography about the obsessive fantasies of a young housewife (Catherine Deneuve) with some of his most mordant jokes and anticlerical broadsides...
BELLE DE JOUR. This bizarre tale of the sexual fantasies of a young wife (Catherine Deneuve) is a fitting capstone to the 40-year-career of Spanish Director Luis Bunuel as it ranges from anticlerical homilies to fetishist daydreams...
...reason people don't move from the room isn't so absurd. They have been running and suddenly can't take the next step. Bunuel shows how agonizing apathy is. You want desperately to go forward, yet you're in a sort of vaccuum. The longer you remain in it, the more you try to fill it up. You bitch and invent distracting crises. The host, upon urging, offers to shoot himself for inviting everybody over. People begin to thirst and starve so that a piece of fruit, rather than departure, occupies their minds...
...almost sacrificial slaughter of sheep climaxes their misery. After that, one woman is able to recreate the party up to the lost moment. This time everybody seizes the moment, goes free. Unfortunately, as Bunuel shows, such trails will recur. People go merrily to church--out of which, at the end of services, they make a new cage. Sheep troop in; another cycle of suffering begins...
...beauty of The Exterminating Angel is that it transforms inner struggle into something almost physical. Bunuel speaks through his company, paralyzed in one room, of the human condition. He prevents the movie from disintegrating into the mysterious-accident type by injecting symbols--the sheep, for example. We always know that the absurd situation and the not-quite-tragic characters are part of Bunuel's allegory. JOEL DEMOTT