Key points
Film info
Synopsis/my notes
FT 553 notes
Film info
Directed by: Luis Buñuel
IMDB link
Synopsis/my notes
Characters sophisticated, polite outwardly, rotten to the core. Smuggle cocaine in diplomatic bag. Ambadassor has affair with Alice Senechal (colleague's wife). Call in chauffeur to drink martini (cutting remarks afterwards).
Sister who drinks too much. Dreams about murder (father of soldier, colonel who insults ambassador), and own death (soldier). Dream about not knowing lines. Dream about someone else's dream. No knowledge of other countries. Remarks about elderly cellist. Bishop shooed out when wearing gardener's garb. Maid chastised mistakenly, no apology.
Characters constantly frustrated. Restaurant closed, second one's owner had passed away. Host and hostess must run into garden to have sex. Ambassador and lover interrupted by arrival of husband. Nothing to drink at cafe. Soldiers come to house, called away just as dinner starts.
Priest called to bedside of man who, as it turns out, had killed his parents. Gives absolution, then shoots him. Men arrested for drug smuggling, women taken in too, but a word from a higher-up get them released. Ambassador dreams of dinner party crashed by Marseilles gang, who machine-gun the lot.
FT 553 notes (from 07/08/04)
Buñuel surrealist. After WWII, monarchies gone. Communism (and sharing wealth) a possbility. Freud posited different faces -- ego, superego, id. Marxism -- assume psyche ruled by certain economic conditions. Surrealists were Marxists. Theory of relativity -- space curves, time curves, not clockwork. Pursuing the hidden. Shower, think of lecture. Let unconscious, worldview, capacity to bend time create picture. Marxism, Freud, Einstein intellectual basis of surrealism in France.
Once meaning removed from surrealism, Dada.
Made after Buñ retired. Dante -- 10th circle of hell, self-serving middle class. Eating, screwing, dram of getting caught -- guilt. Don't let them finish food or union, give nightmares. No barrier between reality and dream.
Eternally going nowhere (six walking on road).