Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Bunuel’s surrealist gem.  Featuring an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of non sequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Bunuel throughout his career – from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.

After the critical and financial success of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Luis Bunuel had free reign to make any film he wanted.  The Phantom of Liberty, the director’s penultimate work, is a surrealist masterpiece, and it brilliantly sums of Bunuel’s career and the themes that preoccupied him through more than thirty films.

Early in the film, a character named Henri rearranges the trinkets on his mantelpiece, saying, “I’m sick of symmetry.”  That could be the tagline for this film, and for Bunuel’s career.  As Henri moves the items about, his young daughter enters with a stack of photographs given to her by a man in the park.  When Henri and his wife look at the pictures, they are shocked at what they see.  “Indecent,” decries Henri.  We expect pornography, but in one of the film’s great reversals, the pictures are revealed to be postcard images: a sunset the Arc de Triomphe, landmarks, tourist stuff, banalities.  In the world of Luis Bunuel, the banal is the most shocking, indecent thing of all.

Henri has also been having some strange dreams.  Rather, what his doctor believes are dreams.  A postman appears in his bedroom to deliver a letter, and Henri’s doctor dismisses it as a dream, but Henri still has the letter.  If you are looking for a resolution to this story, don’t bother.  Before we know it, Bunuel has whisked us off to another time and place.  That is what this film does; it is not a story so much as a collection of bits and pieces of stories, dots that may or may not connect.  As the story shifts, minor characters become major ones, and the background becomes more central than any plot.  One can it through repeated viewings of this film and never be quite sure what happens next, even when we know what happens next.  For most filmmakers, this would be a failure, but for Bunuel the effect is quite the opposite.  Everything is so fluid that we would follow the director anywhere.  Bunuel could take the film in any direction he wishes and it would feel right.

Bunuel once famously proclaimed, “Thank God I’m an atheist.”  Nevertheless, he remained preoccupied by images of Catholic dogma, both in his life and in his work.  Here we have a group of monks gambling with religious symbols.  “I open with a Virgin,” one of them says, throwing in his ante.  We see how cheaply faith is treated, even by its guardians.  It would be too easy to try and define images like this, ascribe meaning to them, to explain away the film in any kind of academic way.  The Phantom of Liberty is dense with classic Bunuel images: the young man trying to seduce his aunt, the dinner party where the guests are seated at toilet bowls (literally shitting where they eat; see, even I can’t help myself); to try and rationalize these things would be to miss the point.  The image is what is important.  That, and the fact that these bizarre goings on are never commented on, they are treated with normalcy.  Bunuel never claimed any rational basis for them and diverted all attempts to do so.  That is the beautiful thing about the film: the images just are, and they can be understood in whichever way is most natural to you.

Bunuel became more preoccupied by terrorism as the years went by.  This may have had something to do with his history in the Surrealist movement.  As a young man in the 1920s, Bunuel and his comrades strove for subversion in everything.  At the time, Andre Breton, one of the leading voices of Surrealism, said, in a comment he would later regret, “The most simple Surrealist act would be to go into the street and shoot indiscriminately into the crowd.”  As Bunuel grew older, things like that actually began to happen, and not out of any absurdist gesture.  There is a passage in the film where that very thing happens.  A man (who, interestingly, carries a briefcase and a purse) goes to the top of a high-rise building and starts sniping people at random.  He is arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced to death... and immediately released.  As he walks out of court, the killer is approached by people asking for his autograph, and he becomes a celebrity.  Even at the time the film was made, Bunuel did not see this as being as absurd as people made it out to be.  Bunuel saw terrorists commit, or threaten to commit, atrocities in one country, only to be given asylum in another.  Terrorism plays heavily into Bunuel’s last three films, particularly his last, That Obscure Object of Desire. 

What does the title, The Phantom of Liberty, mean?  Bunuel once jokingly said that it was a reference to Karl Marx, who wrote in The Communist Manifesto that a phantom was creeping over Europe.  Marx, of course, was talking about Communism, and Bunuel said that the title was as irrational as anything in Un chien andalou.  That is, it has no meaning other than that given it by the viewer.  “Down with liberty” is the first line in the film, and it is also the last, spoken by people revolting against the government.  The line, and the situations in which it is spoken, are similar, the two scenes book ending the film, as if to say that through all the jumping around in time and place, from Napoleon’s occupation of Spain to the present day, nothing really ever changes.  Like Breton’s line about the most simple Surrealist gesture, a thought that became reality, when we first hear “Down with liberty,” it turns out to be just a story, but when we hear it in the end, the situation has become very real.  The film is brought full circle on that, yet it retains an ambiguous quality.  The ostrich looks at us with its innocent gaze, as screams, bells, explosions, gunshots and chaos reign in the background.

Rarely does a filmmaker realize his full powers late in his career, but this was true of Bunuel, his last three films being his sharpest, most daring, most fully realized masterpieces.  He had an innate ability to hone in on the absurdities of everyday life, the bizarre elements in everything we do, and the terror in the banalities of life.  In Bunuel’s world, the chaos and terror is real.  We are the ostrich.

The Phantom of Liberty is presented in the original 1.66:1 shooting ratio.  The transfer is pristine, with all color levels coming through sharply.  Bunuel’s use of color was subtle, and the presentation we have here captures it beautifully.

This DVD is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 Monaural sound.  The presentation is crisp, if a bit front heavy.  The Phantom of Liberty does not have the most complex soundtrack, and the monaural presentation we have is close to the way it was originally recorded, but the audio has been cleaned up nicely, and the presentation is free of defects.

Introduction by Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere: Bunuel’s collaborator through several films, Carriere, in an interview filmed in 2000, talks about the genesis of the film and how certain key scenes relate to Bunuel’s life.  (4:41)

Trailer: The original theatrical trailer.

This DVD also comes with a 32-page booklet featuring a new essay and a reprint of an interview with Bunuel, both of which make for highly interesting reading.