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Rating: Once you reach a certain age, it's right to indulge in some whims. Because you have the wisdom of years, a strong life experience behind you, and nothing more to lose. Nor anything more to prove. Old age is not melancholy: it's liberating. Youth is arduous (every day you always have to prove something), old age is a luxury.
Take Luis Bunuel (born in Calanda, on September 22, 1900) what did he have to prove after winning the Oscar with "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" in 1972? Nothing. He had made countless films, directed quite a few good ones, occasionally stumbled (but who doesn't make a small mistake?), was the father of surrealism tout-court ("Un Chien Andalou", 1929), had just been recognized as a full-fledged author even by those incompetent people at the Academy, what more could he want? But when you reach 74 with so much energy and a desire to do, you can afford anything, even a fierce and countercurrent film like "The Phantom of Liberty."
Don't rush to grasp the film's meaning, which might elude you, or perhaps there isn't one. "The Phantom of Liberty" is a film to be seen. And that's it. After all, Bunuel himself would define this film as a "happy entertainment", and there's no doubt that he had a great time making it, every sequence is a hymn to joy and freedom. Only that, unlike those who conceive entertainment as the off button for their own and others' brains, Bunuel conceived entertainment as meticulous professional work, as a linear work of art. A concept today, alas, fallen into disuse.
"The Phantom of Liberty" is a film, let's say, in episodes. Grotesque, biting, anticlerical episodes (it was Luis Bunuel who pronounced the famous sentence: "I am an atheist, thanks to God"), sharp. And here, at 74 years old, with the freedom to say anything, Bunuel unleashes and says it all. He says what he could not say before, and reiterates, perhaps a bit forcibly, but still with keen intelligence, concepts already expressed in other films. Thus, it is that kaleidoscope of ideas and provocations typical of the most inspired Bunuel: the soldiers of the French Republic assault Spain but the people do not want to rid themselves of oppressive power; an officer desecrates a tomb but finds a completely intact body; a man gives "compromising" photos to a boy; some friars play poker with holy cards; a young man falls in love with his aunt, old faced but young bodied; a man reports his daughter's disappearance but doesn't realize she's right there; the prefect of Paris, due to a misunderstanding, is arrested on charges of being a "grave desecrator"; a man shoots in a crowd, is first arrested, then freed amid the crowd's enthusiastic applause.
Surreal episodes, seemingly unrelated to each other, but with a single (important) common thread: the crisis of society. "The Phantom of Liberty", is what Bunuel tries to uncover within the creases of a completely decaying society (as happened, much more linearly, in "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"), where the word freedom is misused, and true freedom is a mere utopia. No one is free, everyone is a slave to something: some to their own stupidity, some to the fear of freedom, some to their drugged urges, some to misunderstandings. One might say, "freedom does not exist." To Bunuel, it does, only no one can grasp it.
A film that lacks homogeneity, but, for once, it is not a flaw. Perhaps some episodes are lacking, less biting and less successful, but the good ones are truly of the highest class. The sequence of the informal lunch is emblematic, with the similar relationship between eating and defecating, a metaphor for those who confuse freedom with stupidity. Or not? Or perhaps it is not so, perhaps, as I said at the beginning, pure entertainment. And the meanings may exist, but they are not essential to understand the film. Perhaps it's all a joke. Perhaps it's just a great film.
Bunuel asks us to be free, to forget the more classic "plot-film" schemes, he asks us to go beyond. Precisely for this reason, "The Phantom of Liberty" is a unique and unrepeatable film, with a very particular and personal cinematic structure: this collection of mocking scenes does not form, as is usual in episodic films, a "unicum", but a series of unrelated short stories, which alone, form small films themselves. The meaning may be the same, but each is something different from the other, and it is an extremely liberating way of conceiving cinema (look sometimes at the contradictions), loose and final, as only a 74-year-old unbound by any commercial logic could invent.
Worthy of note a cast of great respect, even in its heterogeneity: Bernard Verley, Paul Frankeur, the future Mrs. Pina Fantozzi Milena Vukotic, Adolfo Celi, Jean-Claude Brialy, Monica Vitti, Adriana Asti (one of our most talented and forgotten actresses). All deserving top marks.
It may not be the most beautiful film of the Spanish director (the Bunuel of the fifties is superior to this), but it is the most free, the most fierce, the most revolutionary ever. It deconstructs the bourgeoisie as if it were a piece of bread. Then it laughs about it and mocks it. It weaves philosophies on it, enjoys unsettling the viewer. It may not be perfect like in the times of "Nazarin", but perhaps it is more sincere. Or just older.
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