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The bliss of full-frontal subversion, cinema's most exultant cattle prod, the best Marx Brothers comedy the Marx Brothers never made. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí are once more the grenade-lobbers behind the silver screen, though this dilation of Un Chien Andalou reveals Don Luis as the sublime agitator ready to hurl even the school of surrealism itself into the bonfire. In the beginning were arachnids... Twin parodies of wild-life documentaries (a scorpion hits a bull's eye on a rat's nose) and city symphonies (a solemn cathedral with an eviction notice taped to the window) bracket the discovery of the New World, or is it the founding of Imperial Rome? Underclass impotence on burning rocks, Max Ernst and his crooked-legged comrades are no match for the invading forces of church and country. The pillar is laid over papal skeletons, the ceremony is interrupted by lip-biters writhing noisily. He's a delegate for the International Goodwill Society (Gaston Modot) and she's a high-society heiress (Lya Lys), separated at the beach and reunited at the Marquise of X's gathering of swells. The cow in the boudoir (McCarey's Wrong Again), Chaplin's nonsensical orator, Magritte's mirror. Subterranean desires keep bubbling up, morphing, ballooning—dogs and violins are kicked, a whirlpool of mud/shit fills the screen, fire shoots out of the kitchen. The guests' nonreactions to the bugs on the host's face and the gamekeeper shooting the little brat are gags to disturb and enchant Lubitsch. "Quelle joie de massacrer nos enfants!" The lovers fumble to Tristan and Isolde, bloody-faced and sprinkled with old-age dust, until Modot is called away and Lys must make do with a statue's marble toes. The punchline is the look of exhausted debauchery as Christ materializes like a De Mille figure stumbling out of De Sade's chalet (Pasolini's Salò). With Caridad de Laberdesque, Josep Llorens Artigas, Lionel Salem, and Germaine Noizet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |