That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
That Obscure Object of Desire
Reviewed by James Slone
“That Obscure Object of Desire” is a love story of non-starters, or to put it another way, a love story without the essential ingredients: attraction, affection, or even love. What it does have a lot of it is obsession, jealousy, and spite. It’s about relationships as they generally are for most people. I don’t intend to sound cynical. I’m just entering into the spirit of the film, which was Luis Buñuel’s last and in many ways his most searing, a portrait of two people who all but hate each other playing at love. The personal is always the political in the varied films of Buñuel and nowhere are the politics more chilling than the sexual theater of the bedroom.
The story is simple. Mathieu (Fernando Rey), a privileged member of the French bourgeoisie, boards a train and settles into a comfortable rapport with the other passengers in his carriage. But soon a beautiful young woman, her face bruised, runs along side the train. Paying off an attendant for a bucket of ice water, he dumps it on her head while she stands pleading with him outside a train door as it leaves the station. Naturally, his newfound friends on the train expect an explanation and Mathieu settles into telling the story of his relationship with the girl, a Spanish dancer named Conchita. His story is one of a relationship doomed by the incompatibility of its participants, two people who ignore their obvious failings at their own peril. Almost happily, it would seem.
But this makes “That Obscure Object of Desire” sound drab and tedious, which it’s not. In fact, like most of the director’s work, it’s insidiously comic, finding laughs in the worst excesses of human behavior, at least human behavior as it exists in the soft confines of civil society. Buñuel is in many ways a contributor to the development of the so-called “comedy of cringe,” where the behavior of its characters is so selfish and their comeuppances so terribly deserved that the audience is unsure whether to laugh or turn away in embarrassed horror. We’ve seen this relationship before: two horrible people struggling to love each other when it seems obvious to everyone else that they’d rather be clawing at each other’s throats.
When Mathieu meets Conchita she’s the new girl in his employ. Immediately smitten with her, he arranges to seduce her one night. She flirts with him but leaves him standing in his pajamas and doesn’t show up for work the next day. He assumes he’s lost her. Mathieu is quite wealthy and we’re never quite sure what, if anything, he does. My guess is that he was born into money and probably got wealthier with investment banking or some other hobby of the rich, biding his time with frivolous pursuits. He has a laconic valet (André Weber) who usually seems amused that his employer has made it so far in life. He’s middle-aged but clueless, an archetype Fernando Reyes embodies perfectly in the role.
A few months later, while on a trip in Switzerland, Mathieu is robbed by two young men during a stroll in a park. He’s surprised to find his money returned by none other than Conchita, who happens to be on friendly terms with the two men. They have a seductive conversation and she explains that she lives with her Spanish mother in Paris and that he should come and visit her. He lends her money for the time being, which soon becomes his main means of courting her, and takes her up on her offer when he returns to France. Conchita is pleased to see him arrive.
Conchita is a young woman and Mathieu, whose infatuation is sincere, uses his age and wealth to draw her to him. Nothing he does is overly vile, but being a man of a certain age in a patriarchal society he gradually attempts to buy Conchita, first with small favors to her struggling mother and finally by offering her mother a large sum of money in exchange for her blessings, all without consulting Conchita. The plan blows up in his face and Conchita disappears with her mother. Mathieu is depressed, but in another coincidence, discovers her again working at a café. At this stage things move up a notch and he convinces her to live with him in his vast home.
Conchita is more than a match for the manipulative Mathieu and plays her own game, though with her hand held considerably closer to her chest. Alternately coquettishly sexual and standoffishly cold, her behavior is often just as nakedly manipulative as his. Her balancing act between the erotic and disinterested serves to drive her would-be lover up the wall in a number of brilliant, desperately funny sequences. To show this seeming duplicity, at least from Mathieu’s disheartened perspective, Buñuel uses two actresses to play Conchita, the Spanish Angela Molina and French actress Carole Bouquet. Molina is earthy and buxom with a smirking expression that seems to invite sexual longing and Bouquet is tall, willowy, a classical beauty with icy eyes. These two women are both Conchita, though two sides only Mathieu sees.
The nights spent in his home are among the most frustratingly funny in the film. One minute Conchita is amorous and seductive, the next cold, demanding, or lying in bed nauseated. Every time he turns his back she literally becomes another person. When he’s finally at his breaking point and she won’t put out, he explodes, tearing her night gown off, apparently ready to take her with force, only to discover a complicated chastity belt. He tries to untie its stitches, fails, and then proceeds to sob. When Conchita holds him in her arms and soothes him we almost, though not quite, feel sorry for him. Soon after he hears noises in her bedroom- she refuses to sleep in the same bed- and discovers a young musician hiding in her room with his guitar.
This infuriates him and he throws Conchita out. Using his political connections, he has Conchita and her mother forcibly expatriated back to Spain. But the story doesn’t end there. Soon he’s reunited with her in Spain and things get worse, much worse. What’s interesting about their relationship is that beyond the exercise of power, there’s really nothing between them. These are two people who simply love to hate each other, who go out of their ways to make one another miserable. Mathieu is a lecherous old man, who while sympathetic, really just wants sex- he’s absolutely obsessed with consummation with her even though they have nothing to consummate.
Conchita talks about dance and the spoils of youth and Mathieu looks on with a blank stare, completely disinterested in all but one thing, and it’s obscured from him. Conchita is more complicated, condemning his money while slavishly taking it whenever she can. She gives him just enough to keep him around, but turns shrewish and standoffish whenever he gets too close. She accepts a beautiful home from Mathieu in Seville and then uses it to do one of the worst things a woman can do to a lover short of murdering or mutilating him, delivering a speech of such hateful contempt that you’d be hard pressed to find anything more nasty in the literary canon.
“That Obscure Object of Desire” was adapted by Buñuel and his frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière from Pierre Louys’ 1920 erotic novel “La femme et le pantin” (The Woman and the Puppet), and wasn’t the first or even the second adaptation of the novel, but is certainly the most interesting from an artistic standpoint. The idea of casting two women in the female lead is inspired; it’s not just a novelty, but an integral part of the film. It shows how one person can seem like two to some poor bastard in a very literal way. Buñuel also adds terrorist attacks (terrorism was a major obsession in his later films), punctuating the film with explosions and violence, as if to suggest the tumultuous course of their relationship parallels the break down of societal order in general. The conservative world view of Mathieu, where money and titles buys affection, is under attack in the bedroom and in the streets.
Buñuel was never an idealist. All of his films are about the cynical daily lives and transgressions of hypocrites, whether they’re men of religion, politics, or business. “That Obscure Object of Desire,” named for what Mathieu wants but cannot have, applies that subversive cynicism and wit to the bedroom, as if to show that even our private worlds are fueled by greed and power and that love is less an ideal and more a tool we use to exercise that power over others. Of course, that is not always the case. But what makes this film unforgettable is its perfect expression of the idea that most of the time it probably is. This is not a film for romantics.
jmslone@gmail.com