spoilers
I really wish I hadn't known the title of the movie before seeing it for the first time. The plot is an examination of a walking appetite trying to fulfill itself by subjugating and controlling what it wants. Buñuel brings this to life with Fernando Rey playing an older man who has every need and luxury covered, but cares nothing for it if he can't have an enigmatic young woman named Conchita. Played alternately by an austere beauty, Carole Bouquet, and an impish vixen, Angela Molina, Conchita literally morphs away from him every time Rey's character comes close to having sex with her. Until the very end, she confounds and frustrates him because she is what he can never have.
This is one of those movies that irritate people for several reasons. As a number of other reviews point out, Rey's Mathieu and Conchita are pretty repugnant people. Simply put, the kind of person that expects movies to provide characters who are morally good people to identify with will be as disappointed with Obscure Object as with any Altman or Kubrick film. It isn't that kind of movie. The theme is a dark examination of desire, asking - is it inseparable from a lust for control?
Mathieu spends most of the movie trying to buy Conchita. Initially, he tries to coax her with food like an animal. When he learns she's a virgin, he tries to buy her off her own mother in a weirdly inverted dowry scene. Once he feels he's got exclusive rights to her in his country house, he immediately tries to set her up in his late wife's room - as though she's a new acquisition to replace an old spot left empty. And finally, in the Seville scenes where we see Conchita behind bars several times, he tries to set her up as his private stripper/whore. Conchita feints and rebuffs him at every turn, always stringing him along with a promise to love him on a condition he will never be able to meet. Namely, to respect her freedom as a person.
But she is the `object' in the title and the story is mostly retold by Mathieu himself, so it's almost impossible for Conchita to be a human even to the audience. What anyone can make out by the end is that Conchita is not only coming out ahead in her scam game with Mathieu, but that she is locked into a pattern of sadistic control herself. This quest leads, inevitably, to a kind of consummation where Mathieu beats the snot out of Conchita. Buñuel films the blows carefully and the scene is uncomfortably long. Is this the control that Mathieu bought? As he relates the scene to the people in the train car (a wonderful device for the retelling of an amoral story) he grins ecstatically as he relates how richly she deserved his attack. Then, just like every other time he's felt like he was getting somewhere with Conchita, she turns the tables on him and he finds himself pursuing her. It seems pretty obvious that violence will continue to escalate and the stakes will be higher the next time Conchita winds Mathieu up. But before we have to see this, Buñuel blows them up in a terrorist attack.
Terror and crime exist as background noise during the whole movie. Sometimes seeming to reflect the Mathieu/Conchita plot in news reports and it reinforces the theme of people getting what they desire through violence. A terrorist bomb kills indiscriminately to achieve some desired end (and Buñuel peppers the film with references to ever more absurd terror groups that could have no rational interest in common). A mugger by necessity takes what he wants from strangers. The plot of the movie is almost a literal redistribution of Mathieu's abundant wealth to the squalid Paris suburbs that Conchita lives in and the young drifters she travels with through her elaborate scheme. And the ultimate act of terror is Mathieu finally getting his hands on the protean woman he's been chasing and beating her into submission. Well, that's the penultimate act anyway before they too are consumed in some other person's desire for something that probably had nothing to do with them.
It's a masterpiece. As questionable morally in its intelligent use of stereotypes as Vertigo.
I really wish I hadn't known the title of the movie before seeing it for the first time. The plot is an examination of a walking appetite trying to fulfill itself by subjugating and controlling what it wants. Buñuel brings this to life with Fernando Rey playing an older man who has every need and luxury covered, but cares nothing for it if he can't have an enigmatic young woman named Conchita. Played alternately by an austere beauty, Carole Bouquet, and an impish vixen, Angela Molina, Conchita literally morphs away from him every time Rey's character comes close to having sex with her. Until the very end, she confounds and frustrates him because she is what he can never have.
This is one of those movies that irritate people for several reasons. As a number of other reviews point out, Rey's Mathieu and Conchita are pretty repugnant people. Simply put, the kind of person that expects movies to provide characters who are morally good people to identify with will be as disappointed with Obscure Object as with any Altman or Kubrick film. It isn't that kind of movie. The theme is a dark examination of desire, asking - is it inseparable from a lust for control?
Mathieu spends most of the movie trying to buy Conchita. Initially, he tries to coax her with food like an animal. When he learns she's a virgin, he tries to buy her off her own mother in a weirdly inverted dowry scene. Once he feels he's got exclusive rights to her in his country house, he immediately tries to set her up in his late wife's room - as though she's a new acquisition to replace an old spot left empty. And finally, in the Seville scenes where we see Conchita behind bars several times, he tries to set her up as his private stripper/whore. Conchita feints and rebuffs him at every turn, always stringing him along with a promise to love him on a condition he will never be able to meet. Namely, to respect her freedom as a person.
But she is the `object' in the title and the story is mostly retold by Mathieu himself, so it's almost impossible for Conchita to be a human even to the audience. What anyone can make out by the end is that Conchita is not only coming out ahead in her scam game with Mathieu, but that she is locked into a pattern of sadistic control herself. This quest leads, inevitably, to a kind of consummation where Mathieu beats the snot out of Conchita. Buñuel films the blows carefully and the scene is uncomfortably long. Is this the control that Mathieu bought? As he relates the scene to the people in the train car (a wonderful device for the retelling of an amoral story) he grins ecstatically as he relates how richly she deserved his attack. Then, just like every other time he's felt like he was getting somewhere with Conchita, she turns the tables on him and he finds himself pursuing her. It seems pretty obvious that violence will continue to escalate and the stakes will be higher the next time Conchita winds Mathieu up. But before we have to see this, Buñuel blows them up in a terrorist attack.
Terror and crime exist as background noise during the whole movie. Sometimes seeming to reflect the Mathieu/Conchita plot in news reports and it reinforces the theme of people getting what they desire through violence. A terrorist bomb kills indiscriminately to achieve some desired end (and Buñuel peppers the film with references to ever more absurd terror groups that could have no rational interest in common). A mugger by necessity takes what he wants from strangers. The plot of the movie is almost a literal redistribution of Mathieu's abundant wealth to the squalid Paris suburbs that Conchita lives in and the young drifters she travels with through her elaborate scheme. And the ultimate act of terror is Mathieu finally getting his hands on the protean woman he's been chasing and beating her into submission. Well, that's the penultimate act anyway before they too are consumed in some other person's desire for something that probably had nothing to do with them.
It's a masterpiece. As questionable morally in its intelligent use of stereotypes as Vertigo.