Word: mathieu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is an elegant middle-aged Spaniard who likes brandy and cigars, expensive suits and an occasional pretty woman. He is an unflappable sort-but since he is the hero of a Luis Buñuel film, his poise is soon put to extraordinary tests. Terrorists, for no discernible reason, begin to blow up cars in his tranquil Seville neighborhood. A waiter at his favorite restaurant serves him a martini containing a huge fly. His butler, ordinarily a paragon of civility, starts to give him Up. Somehow Mathieu remains untouched by all these shenanigans, but then he falls...
That Obscure Object of Desire is Buñuel's free-flowing meditation on Mathieu's fall from bourgeois grace, and like so many films by this great surrealist director, it is art of the most subversive kind. Buñuel wants the audience to see the world as he ultimately forces Mathieu to see it-as an irrational state where logic is a worthless tool. In Obscure Object the director never bothers to explain Conchita's stubborn celibacy or any of his story's other absurdities, for he does not believe that any explanations exist...
This is why, in Obscure Object, Buñuel pulls the fiendish stunt of casting two actresses as Conchita, and then proceeds to interchange them at whim. It is his way of saying that the movie's subject is Mathieu's obsessive desire rather than the 'obscure object" that brings it about. There are many other rude jokes as well, all designed to pull the rug out from under civilization as we know it. Buñuel casts a dwarf as a professor of psychology and dreams up a clerical terrorist group called the Revolutionary Army...
...Obscure Object is not quite as good as Discreet Charm (1972) and Tristana (1969), the two Buñuel masterpieces it most resembles, the problem is one of tone. The new film opens on a note of antic humor only to turn, in the second half, unrelievedly grave: as Mathieu and Conchita's relationship lapses into sadomasochistic games, Buñuel's irony gives way to a surprising display of personal despair. The sudden shift in mood does not work, but it is forgivable. Having given his life to one of the century's great artistic revolutions...
...coordinated conspiracy" of aggression led by Somalia and Sudan. Somalia countered that Ethiopia was in fact an aggressor guilty of "black colonialism," "murder" and "massacres." Benin did not even bother to attend the summit because it blames Gabon for last January's attempted coup against Benin President Mathieu Kerekou. Hoping to cool tempers, Nigeria's head of state, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo, observed that "intra-African quarrels now constitute a real threat to peace and harmony in our continent...