That Obscure Object of Desire

In his final movie the 77-year-old Luis Buñuel is at his most puckishly anarchic and insouciantly surreal with an updated version of an early 20th-century novel by Pierre Louÿs, filmed four times previously, most famously in 1935 by Von Sternberg and Dietrich as The Devil is a Woman . Co-scripted by his regular writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, it stars the great Spanish actor Fernando Rey as Mathieu, a pathetic, rich philanderer regaling his fellow railway passengers with the story of being led up the garden path of a poisoned Eden by an alluringly unattainable young woman. She's played by two women – Carole Bouquet representing her cool northern side, Ángela Molina her hot, earthy, Mediterranean aspect – and it's part of the old master's skill that we rapidly accept the capricious duo as a single person. Meanwhile the besotted Mathieu is oblivious to the terrorist outrages masterminded by the "Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus" going on all around him. It's a marvellous finale to a great career, funny, beautifully acted, outrageous. Back in 1978 I described it as "cold, glittering and deadly, like a Fabergé hand grenade". I stand by this opinion. On DVD and Blu-ray.