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Directed by Luis Buñuel...
Screenplay by Luis Buñuel with...
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...
Each fall the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center serves as a 2½-week primer on the state of world cinema. This year, as usual, there is a heavy emphasis on big-name European directors (Bertolucci, Buʼnuel, Pasolini, Bresson), a shortage of American movies, and a sprinkling of exotic entries from underdeveloped nations. Only a few of the festival films are immediately released elsewhere. Among them...