An Old Overholt Won't Ever Let You Down

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
directed by Luis Buñuel
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

L'Age d'Or (1930)
directed by Luis Buñuel
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

There was a time when every movie I watched was famous because well-known titles were the best place to start. That was years ago, and of late I've wanted to return to them. Some I miss, and I've forgotten plenty. That Obscure Object of Desire was my first Buñuel, and I loved it then as much as I do now.

It's one of the movies that David Thomson famously adores. Thomson, like the surrealists, believed that over a long enough footrace, the dreamlike dissonance of motion pictures beats a good narrative every time. "After all," he wrote, "His Girl Friday looks like a newsroom, but it feels like a desert island."

Buñuel was ever gentle and never clever, in the pejorative sense of that word. He had, along with Eric Rohmer, one of the best regular casts in movies. Buñuel was smart, with a sense of humor, and the famous last scene in L'Age d'Or would be funny even without the presence of Jesus. His expression as he emerges from the castle is sublime: weary and elated, it is above all a human countenance, awestruck by the possibilities - even silly, terrible, or dull - of man.

That Obscure Object of Desire adds two beauties from France and Spain in various states of undress, lets the lovable Fernando Rey tap out his doom with a walking stick on the cobblestone streets of Seville, and gathers us in like the passengers in Mathieu's first-class cabin. It is a prickly film right up to the moment when it emerges as one of the medium's most sympathetic love stories. The terrorists' bombs are beating hearts, concussive and badly timed, destructive but sincere.