Die Milchstraße

This movie is one of Luis Bunuel's best and my personal favourite. Though it was filmed between Belle de Jour and Tristana, it has more in common with Bunuel's three last movies - Discreet Charm of the bourgeoisie, Phantom of the liberty and That Obscure object of desire. Bunuel is at his surrealistic and atheistic best. Though some moments may make almost anybody laugh, the movie is intended for highly educated audience, preferably familiar with the history of heresies and the Catholic Church - without this kind of knowledge much of film's charm will be missing. Milky Way may be called a road movie in a sense: two main characters are on a pilgrimage to Santiago-de-Compostella and while on their way, also travel through time - Milky Way is unique in the way it handles this time travel.

The Milky Way is set in comparatively modern times. Two vagabond pilgrims make a journey to Spain. Specifically, to Santiago de Compostela. The remains of James the Apostle were thought to be interred there. On the way they meet various characters from different time periods. Including Jesus, the devil, the Virgin Mary, Jesuits, Jansenists, the Marquis de Sade, assorted clerics and a prostitute. All provide vignettes in which points of heresy are debated. People are routinely condemned to death or challenged to duels based on the fine shading of the wording of faith. It runs like a cross between Pilgrim's Progress and The Canterbury Tales, with just a touch of Life of Brian in passing.

But what puts the Milky Way in a class apart from most films of its ilk – even reverent biblical epics – is its careful adherence to the wording of the theological debates running through Christianity's history. According to Buñuel (who deserted Catholicism for atheism at the age of sixteen), "Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes, the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology."

Strangely, the film was welcomed on release both by Buñuel's anti-religious following and (to his embarrassment) the The Holy See itself. According to his biographer, Buñuel had planned for many years a film that would affirm his atheism, the intellectual scepticism he held towards a church he had renounced in his teens. Director and producer compiled a list of apostasies and repression and concluded that most heresies came from six areas of doubt: (1) The double nature of Christ. Was he God or man? God and man? God pretending to be man? (2) The Trinity; how can three natures co-exist in the same entity? (3) The Immaculate Conception. Mary, a virgin, was nevertheless Christ's mother. (4) Transubstantiation. Can bread literally become the body of Christ? Is this just a metaphor? (5) The problem of God's omnipotence. Is God all-powerful? If so, do we enjoy free will? (6) Evil. Did God create evil? "The list suggested no obvious structure, so they simply dramatized incidents illustrating the heresies, linking them with a pair of wandering modern pilgrims."*

Now if you've read this far, you may well already be interested in theology, whether as a believer or atheist, but it highlights one of the big shortcomings of the film. The psychopathology of Christianity is mainly of interest to its own theologians. While the film will just about hold you if you have already pondered such questions, others may be wondering why he spent so long dwelling on such bilge. Having dispensed, he claims, with such imponderables, is he simply exorcising old ghosts from his early teens? One religious-based reviewer wrote: "Whilst it's certainly sceptical about Christianity, the fact that it's been written by people who know their Catholicism inside out, and are not afraid to make a film that is inaccessible to those do not, means the film at least deserves some respect even if ultimately we disagree with its, somewhat tenuous, conclusions." It is a position with which I could only guardedly agree.

"One thing troubles me," says a young acolyte in one of the film's Spanish Inquisition periods. "The burning of heretics – may it not go against the will of the Holy Spirit?" The inquisitor replies, "It is the secular justice of men that punishes them. Not because they are heretics but for their sedition." Pushing his luck, the acolyte counters with, "But then, those whose brothers have been burnt will burn others, and so on. Each one believing he possesses the truth. Why these millions of deaths?" A stern glance and the acolyte desists – before he too is cast to the flames. (The logic seems more applicable to the constant conflicts between Islam and Christianity – or at least Palestine and Israel. In terms of burning people, the Catholic Church triumphed over every other brand of Christianity with unfettered brutality.)

Perhaps Buñuel found it amusing or even instructive to make this film. The millions of deaths, and the fanaticism that led to them, is not condemned. To the believer, perhaps they were God's will. But to this reviewer at least, Buñuel maybe falls short of his usual high achievements in elevating the good or bringing down hypocrisy. The Milky way is clever enough – even erudite – but ultimately an intellectual exercise rather than the powerful film it could have been.

*(nb - six areas of doubt are quoted from Baxter's biography of the director)

-He who commits sacrilege with an impious movie.

-Let him be an anathema!

By the late sixties,Louis Bunuel,who was an atheist,thanks to God,did not take himself seriously anymore.However this work ,"Le Charme Discret de la Bourgoisie" "Le Fantome de la Liberté" or "Cet Obscur Objet du Désir" were not that much different from "Nazarin " "Simon du Désert" "Viridiana" or "La Mort en ce jardin" .One thing Bunuel's oeuvre does not lack is unity.

"La Voie Lactée" deals with religion.If you've been brought up a catholic,if you have a good knowledge of the gospels ,it can help you appreciate such a film crowded with incident,taking place far away on a road with two pilgrims on their way to Spain (St Jacques de Compostelle),or long ago in Jesus Christ 's times.There is an ironical "documentary prologue" at the beginning of the film - a trick the great director had already used in "Hurdes" when,out of the blue,he began a lecture on the mosquitoes.And if the message is not clear enough,the last message reads "all documents,theories and quotes from the gospels " are historically accurate! In his final movies,Bunuel shows his great sense of humour;Jean-Luc Godard ,he is not.He is so much better!An intellectual director whose work is accessible to anyone.Whatever he films,a spoof on the wedding feast at Cana or George Marchal fighting a duel with Jean Piat (and one of them saying " My liberty is a phantom!!!) because of a disagreement about theology, students cursing the heathen ,he rules.

Bunuel tackles the Christian dogma :his priests and holier-than-thou characters such as the butler in front of his luxury buffet or the headmistress of the chic girls school are often contradicting what they said before .And the humble people they meet ask sometimes relevant questions ;dig this one: "what will become of the host (our Lord's body) in the human stomach?".And Bunuel does not confine himself to the Christian religion:"nowadays",the vicar says,"the entire world is catholic! " "What about the Muslims?the Jews?" "The Muslims ARE catholics;so are the Jews ,mainly the Jews." The scene of the crazy priest might have been borrowed from the Fernandel sketch of "Le Diable et Les Dix Commandements " by Julien Duvivier (1962).The scene at the inn,-perhaps inspired by Autant-Lara 's anti-clerical "L'Auberge Rouge"- with its priceless tale of a Virgin Mary's miracle and the mystery of the passing of the hours of the night will be used again in the "Fantôme de la Liberté" with gusto.

The cast is a who's who of the French actors of the era:Laurent Terzieff,an intellectual thespian ,is cast against type as an uneducated tramp (but the films suggest he might have been a revolutionary man);Edith Scob is the perfect Virgin Mary;Delphine Seyrig, the future stand out of "Le Charme Discret ..." has only three minutes to shine ,and she succeeds brilliantly .Plus Michel Piccoli,Julien Berteau,Alain Cuny,Bernard Verley,Denis Manuel,Pierre Clementi and many more.

Do go on a pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques de Compostelle with Luis Bunuel!

It's not a film that has all the answers. It's a film that casts doubt on all the answers we've had. Early in the film we hear the line, "A religion without mystery is not a religion at all. A heresy that denies a mystery can attract the weak and the shallow, but can never blot out the truth." My ears perked up. I was keenly interested in a film that was going to confront both religion and its opposition head on.

Two modern-day travelers are on the road as the film opens, from Paris to Spain. It's the customary episodic framework of the poor enduring as transient vagabonds feeling purpose in heading in a particular direction. It's also the even more customary fable of the wandering adventurer and his companion in search of revelation and virtue. Spanish-born absurdist filmmaker Luis Bunuel juxtaposes these narrative customs into a sort of cinematic reality existing in a unique dimension. The pilgrims are contemporary but time and space chaperon them in a continual instant and an all-encompassed earth science.

The protagonists of blasphemy and tradition portray their ideals in age-old Palestine, in the Europe of the Middle Ages, in the Age of Reason, and in today's hotels and fashionable restaurants, and on its boulevards. The Holy Virgin, her son Jesus and his young brothers, an arrogant ecclesiastical headwaiter and his submissive workers, a bleeding child by the roadside, the pope facing a firing squad, the Whore of Babylon ambushing ramblers, the Marquis de Sade, the Jansenist fencing with the Jesuit, Satan himself decked out as a rock star, an overzealously formal schoolmarm and her programmed little students chanting anathemas, self-righteous bishops and demented priests on the lam, this panoramic cast of characters, in itself a smirking take-off of Hollywood's epic ensembles, somehow expresses the barren conceptions of Christian dissent. Is there such a thing as the Holy Trinity? Was Christ God, man, and Holy Ghost one after the other, at the same time, or was he invariably just God the Father disguised as a human, so as to be seen? Was Jesus solely the mortal embodiment of a supreme spirit? Was his anguish then just facade? Because if he experienced pain at the hands of mortals, was he a god? Was Christ merely a smidgen of God's psyche? Are we free to discern between the exploits of Jesus the man and the teachings of Christ the god? Was Christ indeed two men, one born of God the Father, the other of Mary the Mother? Did Mary become pregnant in the same manner that light exceeds through a window glass? Did Jesus have brothers?

As Buñuel conceives visual substance to these religious contemplations, he does so with far- flung ability in banter and farce. The escaped lunatic believes that Christ is in the host like the rabbit is in the pâté. The pope's death by firing squad is something we'll never see. The debate of doctrine by the hostile maître d' and his waiters is in the royal practice of slapstick comedy. The dueling clerics clanking swords for Jesuitical piety and Jansenistic sin are a comic rendition of the vintage MGM swashbuckling jousts pared down to knowingly meaningless and irrational argument.

However, side by side with the broad comical tone, Buñuel is here tussling with the inconsistencies between faith and faithlessness. The young heretic who dons the hunter's garb and shoots at the rosary receives it back from the hands of the Virgin Mary and lets tears cascade down his heretical face. Really, as Pierre tells Jean when lightning strikes, God knows all, but we don't know what he knows. Buñuel apparently favored scenes which could just be pieced together by the ends in the editing room, producing long, mobile wide shots which follow the action. He aggregates all of these significations and implications into a streaming, uninterrupted visual existence recognizing the curious obscurities of both the comformists to the approved form of Christianity and the professed believers who nonetheless maintain contrary theologies and reject church-prescribed doctrines, while prosecuting the dogmatic certitudes of both. How else could you do it? It's a concept for a film that could only befit a surrealist.

I might be tempted to call the Milky Way a masterpiece, but for all of the excellent scenes that dance along on the edge of being silly, strange, dead-serious, and scathing in attack, Luis Bunuel doesn't make it quite an easy first viewing. It is, alongside Phantom of Liberty, though maybe more-so considering its picaresque flow, a difficult film to follow at times, as the folds go in and out of the two pilgrims on their way to Compostela as if in an ocean current. We see Jesus and his disciples. We see some 15th (or 4th) century sermons and heretic slayings and practices, sometimes seeming as mystical as something out of the Dark Crystal. And there's even a duel between two sides of the Catholic coin debating between specifics in the nature of god while fencing furiously. It's what could be defined, if one were looking for an easy label, true surrealism, pointed right at the edge of contradictions, of the daring of the random and of chances taken at the expense of all authority be damned, and at the same time it's a drama of fanaticism and faith in general. What is it to believe and actually buy into these guys, who at their most genial are storytellers and at their worst will burn you at the stake for not going for God in threes versus God as one?

Bunuel, at the least for his admirers, makes an attempt with his collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, to raise questions in the midst of raucous entertainment. Although Bunuel can be even greater when being devilish and playful (eg Discreet Charm), the Milky Way displays the filmmaker reveling in the history and nature of heresy in a construct that's maybe more daring. One truly can't expect what will come next, as one may see a scene with a priest flip-flopping about whether or not the Holy Ghost is in the communion wafer or not (and soon thereafter taken back to the asylum), and then a scene with a rag-tag group of evangelicals in the woods who may or may not be paying heed to God, or to the Devil, or both, or a chef being questioned about how Jesus walked and then a cut-away to how Jesus really walked. As the two pilgrims go along their way, having their own delirious encounters- missing by a bit being struck by lightning, debating Christian free will, one hoping for a car to crash, which does, and then seeing some angel of death or other in the back-seat, and in their continuous streak of being turned away/kicked out by those who would take them in if not for essential hypocrisies- a pattern does start to form (if one could call it that), or at least the essential pieces to Bunuel's puzzle.

A lot of times one laughs at the subtlety and the outrageousness: should Jesus shave, do nuns crucify one another, how much can a priest pontificate about not having sex under any circumstances. But it's actually after the film ends that even more ideas start to come around. And yet Bunuel is so cunning, so deadpan with how he directs the actors- some part of his repertory, some not- that it skims into becoming straight drama, which in that case would make it almost dull; the film actually faced some (un-fair) criticism when first released that Bunuel had suddenly made a film cherishing the things he used to damn. How curious, deranged, and honest even in this part of the appeal, the playing of both sides. While it is fairly well known that Bunuel became an atheist following a strict Catholic upbringing (one quote of his, also the name of a documentary on the Criterion DVD, is "I'm an atheist, thank God"), it's never clear whether Bunuel will take one side or the other. There's things that are f***ed up about those who go without any question at all, like the little girls reciting verbatim on the stage, but also of what the man envisions of revolutionaries shooting the Pope in a firing line.

Even for those who may consider themselves atheists, as Bunuel might have up to a point (like Scorsese, no matter how much can be sort of dropped, there still remains chunks that stay as part of the auteur), and for those who are rigid believers, The Milky Way attempts to open up a discussion of dogma, heresies- many long forgotten before the writers dug them up in research- and why one should even believe if there is no definitive proof. For all of Bunuel's skewering of schizophrenic or quietly sex obsessed priests and moments of pure mystery like the man who first comes to the pilgrims, there is bits of reverence too, like for the Virgin Mary- who at times becomes part of the debate- and it's challenging and refreshing to see nothing left solidly as 'this is this for sure'. If it may feel a little loose an imperfect on a first viewing it shouldn't detract from everything that can be taken away as pure food for Bunuelian thought.