The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luis Buñuel · a film in French, Cet obscur objet du désir · 1977 · written with Jean-Claude Carrière · produced by Serge Silberman · photographed by Edmond Richard
Mode
Comedy of manners and of frustration, told in flashback as a self-defence; satire built on one unexplained device
Mythos
The woman who withholds and the man made a puppet; Carmen in Seville; the courtly lady whose refusal is the love; the chastity belt kept literal
Phase
One journey by train from Seville to Paris, holding the account of a long pursuit told in returns, and ending in a Paris arcade
Presentation
Feature film in colour, French dialogue, about 103 minutes; a French and Spanish co-production; one part played by two actresses in turn
Register
From a man fumbling at knotted laces in the dark to a bomb in a shopping arcade; dry, level and comic throughout
Scale
One man, one desire, two women in one part, and a Europe of bombs at the edge
Governing Proposition
A rich man empties a bucket of water over a young woman on a station platform, and tells the strangers in his train compartment the story of his desire for her, a poor girl who promised and refused him again and again. The wager of the film is that the woman he describes is not a person to him but a place in his mind, so that two actresses can play her by turns and he never notices, and that a society of bombs goes on talking through its violence as he talks through his.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
At the station in Seville a rich man is leaving for Paris by train. He is Mathieu Faber, a widower, played by Fernando Rey. On the platform he takes a bucket of water and empties it over a young woman, and then takes his seat. The passengers in his compartment saw it, and he explains himself to them. The film becomes his account, given in flashback, and comes back to the compartment between its episodes, where his listeners wait, entertained, for the next.
The frame is the first thing the film knows. Mathieu’s account is given to strangers to justify an act of contempt, so the whole story that follows is a self-defence: a man’s case for himself, told to people who enjoy it and have no means of checking it. Everything shown of the woman he describes is shown as he tells it, and her own account is never given. The film lets one person stand outside his story, and that is the woman on the platform, who will be on the train.
Buñuel made it in 1977, at seventy-seven, and it was his last film. He wrote it with Jean-Claude Carrière, freely from Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin (1898), which Josef von Sternberg had filmed as The Devil Is a Woman (1935) and Julien Duvivier with Brigitte Bardot (1959). Serge Silberman produced it as a French and Spanish co-production, and Edmond Richard photographed it in colour. It follows The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974), made with the same producer and the same writer, and keeps their manner: a plain camera, a level tone, and one unexplained thing at the centre. The film scored is the French-language version as released, of about 103 minutes.
Movement II
The story Mathieu tells is of Conchita, a poor young woman who first comes into his life as a maid. He wants her, and the pattern of the whole account is set at once: he approaches, she promises, she refuses, she leaves, she comes back, and the cycle begins again. Desire in this film is a repetition, and the film repeats with it, episode by episode, each a variation on the last.
Then, with no announcement and no change in the story, Conchita is played by another actress. Two actresses take the part, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, and they alternate between scenes, sometimes within a single sequence. Nothing in the fiction marks the change, and Mathieu never notices. The first time it happens the ground of the picture shifts. The most basic contract of narrative film, that one body is one person, has been broken, and the film goes on as if it had not.
The device came of necessity. Maria Schneider was first cast as Conchita and left the production, and the two-actress solution followed. What it does on screen is not reduced by how it arose. Played by one actress, Conchita would be a woman with a character, capricious or calculating, and the film would be Louÿs’s, a study of a cruel woman. Played by two, she is a place in a man’s mind, and the knowledge is about him. Whether the alternation keeps a law, Bouquet’s composure against Molina’s warmth, French against Spanish, refusal against yielding, or keeps none, has been argued both ways, and the film does not say.
Movement III
Conchita lives with her mother, and Mathieu deals with the mother. Her debts, her favour and her daughter’s time are things a rich man can pay for, and he pays. What he cannot buy is the one thing he wants. Conchita’s refusal is the only thing in the account that his money does not purchase, and so her chastity is also her wage and her weapon: it is what keeps him paying, and what she holds against him.
On the night of the corset Mathieu finds that what he has waited for is laced shut. Conchita wears a corset tied with knotted laces, and he fumbles at them in the dark. It is the chastity belt of the romances, played for comedy and kept literal, and the film takes it no further than a man’s hands on a knot. The refusal has become a garment, and the scene is the comic centre of the account: the same refusal that will later turn cruel is here only a knot he cannot untie.
Around the account, the world is exploding. Bombs go off, there are kidnappings, and radio bulletins report them; a terrorist group calls itself the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. Mathieu and the people of his kind talk through it, as the compartment listens through his story. The bombings keep to the film’s one law: violence, like desire, is deferred and then discharged without warning, and the comfortable go on talking. Among these things Mathieu carries a sack over his shoulder, and the film never says what is in it or why.
Movement IV
In Seville the pursuit reaches its height. Mathieu’s money buys a house there, and the refusal goes on regardless. In Seville too Conchita dances naked for tourists, and the body he has been refused is shown to strangers for money. It is one of the few scenes in which the film rises, and it rises by shock rather than by transport.
Then the night at the iron gate. Mathieu stands at the gate and through it watches Conchita with a young man. The refusal has become a display, staged, as he tells it, for the one spectator it is meant to wound. It is the film’s most uncanny height and its cruellest, and it is still his account: what the passengers hear is what he saw, and why she did it is never said.
Then the beating, and the reconciliation that follows. Mathieu strikes her, and the courtesy of his account gives way. The violence in him, the beating and the bucket of water, answers the violence in the street. After the beating comes the return, and the cycle begins again: approach, promise, refusal, flight. A man telling strangers how he was wronged has told them, without seeming to notice, that he beat her.
Movement V
The account ends, and the compartment has been entertained. Conchita is on the train, and she returns the bucket of water in kind. The opening gesture is answered by the one person present who could contradict the story, and the frame closes on its own figure: the bucket opened the account, and the bucket ends it.
At Paris the film leaves the train. In an arcade a woman in a shop window mends a bloodied lace garment. A bomb goes off, and the film ends. Desire and violence, deferred through the whole length of the film, are discharged at once and without warning, and nothing said in the compartment has prepared for it. The comedy of a man and his refusals is closed by the street’s explosion, which the film’s comfortable people have been talking through from the start.
Forty-nine years on, the questions have stayed open: why two actresses, and whether their alternation keeps a law; whose film it is, the man’s account or the film’s critique of it; what the terrorists have to do with the love story; what the sack is; what the last explosion ends. Feminist and psychoanalytic readings have both claimed it, and neither has closed it, and it is taught as Buñuel’s last film and as the case of the two actresses. Among his films on this desk it stands below The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at 8.6, Viridiana at 8.5, and The Exterminating Angel and Belle de Jour at 8.3, and above The Phantom of Liberty at 7.7. It is the most single-minded of them: one desire, one man’s account of it, and one stroke of casting that makes the account show what it hides.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, the frame is required. Mathieu’s account is given to strangers to justify an act of contempt, so the whole told story is a self-defence, which is what the film knows. The bucket of water is required twice, opening the frame and answered when Conchita, on the train, returns it. The cycle of approach, promise, refusal, flight and return is required in kind: desire is a repetition, and the film must repeat. But the subtractive test finds give in that very repetition. The episodes are near-interchangeable units in a series, and one of the middle returns could go with little loss of meaning, only of duration. The bombings are required as a law of the world and placed with a freedom that looks assembled as often as compelled. That holds the axis two tenths above the cap.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man’s desire lives on what it cannot have, and its object is not a person to him but a position, so that two women can occupy it and he never notices. The film shows this rather than saying it; the casting is the statement. A second truth lies under it, about money. Mathieu buys the mother, the house in Seville and the girl’s time, and her refusal is the one thing his money cannot purchase, so that her chastity is also her wage and her weapon. A third, of bombings and kidnappings as background noise to the comfortable, is given in image and sound. What holds the axis below the bar is the woman: the film discloses the male projection fully and the woman behind it only as a refusal, and so repeats in part the gaze it exposes.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Buñuel’s register is dry, level and comic, and elevation is not its mode; the axis is indifferent to which elevation, and here there is little of any. When the film rises it rises by shock and the uncanny: the first unannounced change of actress, which unsettles the ground of the picture; Conchita dancing naked for tourists in Seville; the night at the iron gate; the beating; and the last image, a bomb in a Paris arcade after a woman in a shop window has mended a bloodied lace garment. These are strong, and they are few. The long middle is played as a comedy of manners and frustration, elegant and flat by intention, and a level intended is still a level. The doubled actress unsettles some viewers throughout and others not at all, and is not counted as a recurring height. Frequency holds the axis lowest.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The source is a late form of the oldest matter: the woman who withholds and the man made a puppet, Carmen in Seville, the courtly lady whose refusal is the love. At one point the film builds rather than cites. The doubled Conchita turns the femme fatale into what the archetype always was, a mask the male gaze puts on whichever woman stands before it. The corset with its knotted laces is the chastity belt of the romances, played for comedy and kept literal. The sack Mathieu carries over his shoulder recurs and is never explained: myth evoked and left there. The particular stays particular: a bucket, a compartment, a mother’s debts. What holds the axis well below the bar is that most of this matter is inherited from Louÿs and the Carmen tradition and summoned as setting; the built element is one stroke, deep as it is.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is a much-filmed erotic novel, made by von Sternberg as The Devil Is a Woman (1935) and by Duvivier with Brigitte Bardot (1959); the European art film of desire; and Buñuel’s own late French manner with Silberman and Carrière, in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). The departure is the casting: one character played by two actresses who alternate between scenes, sometimes within a sequence, with no sign in the fiction. It breaks the most basic contract of narrative film, that one body is one person, and makes the break the meaning; the bombings threaded through a love story are a lesser turn. The stake was a costly co-production at seventy-seven, discounted because the device came of necessity when the first lead left. Held below the bar because the rest of the film keeps to Buñuel’s proven path, deadpan and classical, and the stroke, radical as it is, is single.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Cast one actress, and Conchita becomes a woman with a character, capricious or calculating, and the film becomes Louÿs’s, a study of a cruel woman; with two, she becomes a place in a man’s mind, and the knowledge is about him. Remove the frame, and the account loses its partiality: this is a man’s case for himself, told to strangers who are entertained, and Conchita on the train is the one person present who could contradict him. Remove the bombings, and the obsession loses the world it ignores. The form is the instrument at three levels. What holds the axis here is what lies between them: the episodic body inside the frame is plain linear narration, inherited grammar well used, its episodes interchangeable, and the device works from the casting more than from the cutting or the camera.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Forty-nine years of return are evidence, and the questions have stayed open: why two actresses, and whether their alternation follows a law, cool and warm, French and Spanish, refusing and yielding, or none, which has been argued both ways; whose film it is, the man’s account or the film’s critique of it; what the terrorists, the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, have to do with the love story; what the sack is; what the last explosion ends. Feminist and psychoanalytic readings have both claimed it, and neither has closed it, and on return the alternations can be tracked. What holds the axis here is that much of the yield is one question, the device, returned to. The episodes and characters are drawn plainly enough to be exhausted sooner than the structure of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or the scandal of Viridiana.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Released in 1977, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is one real reorganisation of possibility: the demonstration that a single character can be split between performers without explanation, and that the split can carry the meaning; around it, a late art film that made political terror an ambient condition of bourgeois life. The rest of the film perfects Buñuel’s own manner rather than moving the field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the device is cited wherever casting against identity is discussed; later films that divide one character among several performers are set beside it, their debt not settled here; and the film closed a great career and is taught with it. What holds the axis here is the narrowness of that reach: the device has few true successors, a famous stroke more often admired than adopted, within art cinema.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-nine years. The form survives whole in its one cut; restorations for home video repair it, and nothing is lost. Presence has been continuous, in repertory, on television and home video, and in teaching, as Buñuel’s last film and as the case of the two actresses; it is narrower than that of his most exhibited work, and has not passed far beyond cinema. The surface fixed to its moment is real: the bombings were topical in 1977, in a Europe of the Red Brigades and ETA, and the dress, light and lingerie are of their decade. Against that, the terror is kept abstract and satirical, a group named for the Infant Jesus, and the obsession it frames has not dated. Presence that is steady rather than widest leaves little room above the bar.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The making is exact and unemphatic: Buñuel’s plain, mobile camera, Richard’s even light, scenes staged in few set-ups and cut without flourish, which is what lets the change of actress pass almost unseen. That the substitutions do not jar the continuity is a feat of direction and editing, and there the making bears weight. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu, courteous, self-pitying and violent, carries the film; Carole Bouquet’s composure and Ángela Molina’s warmth are each exact, and their difference is calibrated. The charges weigh. The compartment scenes are perfunctory as drama; some of the middle is staged flatly, in a television-era colour; the secondary figures are sketches. The making bears weight at the one point that matters most, and elsewhere is assured rather than load-bearing.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of the corset, Mathieu fumbling at knotted laces in the dark, and the explosion that ends the film. One law governs both: desire and violence are endlessly deferred and then discharged without warning, and the comfortable go on talking through both. The two actresses obey it, whichever is in the frame: the refusal is the same refusal, and Mathieu’s response is the same. The bucket obeys it, opening and closing the account; the bombings, the radio bulletins and the compartment’s polite audience belong to the same physics of distraction. What holds the axis here is range and strain: comedy of manners to sudden violence in a narrow social world, the sack and some surreal intrusions sitting loosely, and the frame’s listeners a convenience more than a law.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 103 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Mathieu’s account, his self-pity and his blindness; the family, in Conchita’s mother and the transaction made through her; money and class, in a rich widower’s purchase and a poor girl’s refusal, and in labour as service, the maid, the valet, the dancer for tourists; the state and history, in bombings, police and a Europe of political terror; the sacred, mocked, in the Infant Jesus of the terrorists’ name. They are touched more than held. What holds the axis lowest is that everything passes through one man’s obsession, and the orders beyond it are set at the edge as noise; Conchita’s consciousness is withheld by design, and history is a sound off screen. A chamber film of one desire: the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.4. A film that survives whole in its one cut and is continuously shown and taught, as Buñuel’s last and as the case of the two actresses; a form whose casting, frame and bombings are each an instrument of what it knows; and one law of deferral and sudden discharge that governs a corset in the dark and a bomb in an arcade.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime and The Encompassed at 7.4: the film rises by shock and the uncanny at a few points, and its long middle is level by intention; and every order it touches passes through one man’s obsession, with Conchita’s consciousness withheld and history a sound off screen. Above them, The Inevitable at 7.7, a required frame around episodes that repeat and could lose one of their number, and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, one famous stroke more often admired than adopted.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5; every other axis it counts stands at 7.7 or above. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.5, an average of 8.04 that displays 8.0, in the band of Tier IV and a full point short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Cet obscur objet du désir as released in France in 1977, in its French-language version, the version in circulation and the one cut known, from the platform at Seville to the arcade in Paris: directed by Luis Buñuel from a screenplay by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, freely after Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin (1898), produced by Serge Silberman as a French and Spanish co-production, and photographed in colour by Edmond Richard, with Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, and with Julien Bertheau and Milena Vukotic. The film as released is the unit; restorations for home video bear on its survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English renderings are a reader’s aid, and nothing here is charged to them. No dialogue is quoted, because the wording of no line is certain here; scenes are described instead, and only the title is given in the original. The frame, the device of the two actresses and the principal episodes are held firmly; the order of the middle episodes, the stretches in Switzerland and Paris, and the names and roles of several secondary figures are held with less confidence, and the essay does not set the middle in order. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, whether the lead’s voice is dubbed by another actor in the French version, the editor, the players of the secondary parts, a Spanish-dubbed version, the writers’ count of collaborations, the film’s award nominations, the later films said to owe it their split casting, the number of scenes and shots and the count of the alternations, are not given.