I'll be honest, I mostly like my movies to be conventional which simply means to me that they should have a beginning, middle and ending, plus a credible plot and believable characters. I've never cottoned on to the cinema of the surreal or the absurd and have always thought you can keep all that Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodovar stuff away from my door.
But, I live in Spain now and I have a learned Spanish neighbour who has encouraged me to watch some Spanish cinema particularly the films of Bunuel and so a few months ago I made a point of watching his earlier work "Viridiana" which I very much enjoyed and deciding to dip into his repertoire again, selected this particular movie, even if it was produced in France, as it seems to be his best known and perhaps most celebrated work. So glad I did.
Did I perceive every nuance of the director's intentions? Probably not. Did I understand the bigger arguments he was making, which to be fair is pretty much all there in the title? I think so though I can't be sure. Was I kept watching all the way through down to the delicious combination of intrigue, amusement and curiosity? Absolutely!
The narrative is simple. Three male-female couples want to sit down to dinner in modern-day France. The males are all in some way connected to the governance of an imaginary French protectorate in South America called Miranda with the most prominent among them being Fernando Rey as the country's ambassador, but all six are of the distinctly upper class set.
But don't be fooled into thinking that these suited and booted individuals are pillars of society. Far from it. As well as apparently having designs on each other's wives we also see that the three men are involved in the illegal trafficking of heroin.
It seems that every time they sit down to eat, an ever more bizarre outside intervention takes place before they can put the food to their lips. Much later Bunuel interjects into the narrative the dreams of a young French army officer who just happens along and then the daydreams of the lead characters themselves some of which in fact overlap the dreams of the others. Some of these are eerie, while others are comical.
If pushed, yes I can see the film attacking the governing elite, here shown as corrupt and without morals, but it's more the individual scenes that stay in the memory such as the shocking sequence when the local bishop, who joins the group, oddly enough as a gardener, later cold-bloodedly shoots dead an already dying man after he learns that years ago the man was the never-caught killer of his own parents or when the six are slaughtered Romanov-style by presumably Miranda freedom-fighters near the end.
But I also love the comic touches like when the group discover themselves playing themselves on stage in front of a baying audience, or when an important telephone conversation is drowned out by the sound of aircraft flying overhead in an almost Woody Allen-type moment. The funniest of many in the film for me was the sight of Ray's character giving himself away to the Miranda assassins by reaching up to the table under which he is concealed for a piece of duck he's waited all movie-long to taste.
Listen, don't ask me to write an essay on this film. All I know is that I found it very original, entertaining and funny in equal measure. A moveable feast in fact.
