Le fantôme de la liberté

There is no denying that "The Phantom of Liberty" is a flat out WEIRD movie filled with surrealist gags and head scratching visuals, but does that make it a good movie exactly? It depends on whom you ask, many film buffs are certainly huge fans of Bunuel's odd, quirky, and mindbending style while the casual viewer may simply dismiss his work as being pretentious nonsense disguised as "art". Personally, I side with the former view, and while watching "The Phantom of Liberty' I gleefully relished in Bunuel's bizarre glory. This certainly is not a film for those seeking a clear definable plot or a series of light, cliché jokes; instead, it is a wild ride through Bunuel's vast imagination. It is a series of comical scenes, much like Bunuel's previous work "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", rather than being a film with any real plot. Similarly to Linklater's "Slacker", the film just follows character after character once the camera seems to get bored with them and their comical vignette is done. Otherwise, however, this film is nothing like "Slacker" and, instead, mostly mirrors every gem of surrealist comedy one could think of. It sort of works as a culmination of everything Bunuel has made as he shows off his signature style, aware that he is approaching the finale of his career. Sense is thrown out of the window and is replaced with ostriches, toilet bowls, and architectural imagery that is perceived as being pornographic. Bunuel playfully mocks religion as always, while also breaking countless taboos, stuffing his film with just enough violence and sex to both shock and amuse (often at the same time).

Through many episodes with some linking points since 1808 in Toledo (Spain) to the present days in France, Bunuel presents a delicious surrealistic satire to the moral and costumes of the hypocrite society, to the family values and to the church. I liked very much some parts, like, for example, the hypocrisy of the priests in a hotel, praying for the health of the father of a guest in a moment, and drinking and playing cards like gangsters in the next moment. The bourgeoisie family sat on toilets in the dining room and producing crap while having a conversation is fantastic, reflecting his opinion about the dominating class. The little girl that "vanished" for her parents is a great critics to the behavior of most families. The hypocrisy of the justice, reflected in the segment of the sniper. It is amazing the interpretations each segment offers to the viewer through the symbolism of Bunuel. However, this movie is recommend for very specific audiences. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Fantasma da Liberdade" ("The Phantom of the Liberty")

What can one say after watching "The phantom of liberty"? if you want to make films of your own, you can only be jealous with the power of Buñuel at directing the most simple everyday situations with a surrealist twist without thinking twice and flicking an eye. his hatred of the bourgeoisie is evident here even much more in then in his masterpiece "The discreet charm...". and the reason is: in that film there was a plot, a reason, a context which within things were happening, and the viewer could relate to things that happened earlier in the film. but in this picture there is no line, not one story, but stories that don't even intertwine with one another. just a collection of fragments, some strange, some funny, some totally impossible.

The freedom that Bunuel takes upon himself is backened with a lot of responsibility. one has to be responsible and not losing the viewer. but this freedom is exactly the same that he had as an artist while making "Un chien andalou", or "Archibaldo de la cruz". it's just that this time there is an attack at yet another bourgeoisie item: order. stories claim order. so is the ruling class.

So Bunuel and Carriere decided to attack the order of storytelling itself. it's a very tricky business to do on film, but if you understand the way dream works, no problem. let's go straight ahead. and so much fun is promised.

Just like any other Bunuel film, there are no special effects, no overwhelming shots, no camera or editing tricks. just an attack, there is no other way calling this, on reality of the mind, of the eye and of order of things. it is only when you release yourself from social rules that are false, fake and immoral, you can become free again. only when you see your fellow man and his suffering, you can become moral. only when you cry against social injustice, you can justify the revolution of humanity against greed and the wars it inflicted us into. if you'll keep on crying "death to freedom", you are in danger of becoming one of them bourgeois guys. and it's so easy, my god...

Luis Bunuel's "Le Phantôme de la liberté" is a movie whose episodes are only loosely connected, because the watcher is a part of the society whose liberty and freedom is a phantom. Moreover, it is man who watches this movie that also creates the story – not on the screen, of course, but in her or his mind. This is a movie that does never go out of your mind.

The clue scene is in the episode where Margaret Mead's books are mentioned. And in fact, since this movie deals with liberty and with persons of very different cultural, religious and aesthetic backgrounds, it is a sociological movie. It was Mead who gave the direction to the late cybernetician Heinz von Foerster's (1911-2002) work: Second-order cybernetics. It is called "second order" because this theory has an environment in which subject and object have a space of liberty. Only in such an environment-based logic it is possible to reflect to oneself. And this is exactly what happened in Bunel's core-scene: The teacher speaks to his students that laws have exceptions because they are depending on man, and man is depending on evolution. Therefore, there can be no laws at all, because they also stay and fall with evolution. And if they are no laws at all, then they are no causal relations. And if there are no causal relations, then form and function vanish, exactly like in Bunuel's movie. But the most important point is that this conclusion is reflected in the movie itself. The teacher who makes this self-reflection moreover has much in common with Bunuel, so for example, when he criticizes the standard level of human life in Spain – as Bunuel did in an interview.

Another interesting point is that the physician's name is Dr. Pasolini. Bunuel's movie was released in 1974, thus just at the time when Pier Paolo Pasolini started to film his last work "Salo", in which (amongst many other marvelous events) there is the famous or infamous scene where people are forced to eat faeces. But faeces play an important role in Bunuel's "Phantom of Liberty" (so the English title of this movie), too: The teacher explains his friends how many kilograms of faeces a human produces daily, and since there are so and so many billions of people on this world, this makes so and so many tons of faeces per year. Then, the teacher has lunch in the restroom (one of the most famous scenes of this movie). And finally, in his regular bar, the teacher explains the girl who resembles to his sister that this sister died because her intestines exploded. This three-times occurrence of faeces, the mentioning of Pasolini and the insight that form and function must abolish only because of human evolution leads the critical watcher to a conclusion about the sociology of human life that is not too far away form that of Pasolini: All mankind is able to produce is faeces.

Although Bunuel made one more movie ("Cet obscur object du désir", in 1977), he considered the "Pantom of Libery" his testament. Pasolini's testament was the "Salo". Bunuel still lived nine more years after his "Phantom", Pasolini was killed shortly after the postproduction of "Salo". Pasolini was radical and consistent, Bunuel still had kept his sense of humor (the "Phantom" ranges under "comedy", at least officially). Perhaps in the end, it was the humor that let Bunuel alive, while its absence killed Pasolini. Or was Bunuel's humor gallows humor? He drank himself to death.

One of Buñuel's greatest films. Scene after scene arguments are used as beautiful excuses to subvert reality and attack established and hypocritical institutions with acute humor and surrealist means. If you have a taste for surrealism and absurd humor (i.e. Monty Python, Marx Bros., etc.) this movie cannot be recommended enough.

One small correction: the sniper is not sentenced to death but to capital punishment which results in something altogether different from death (and far more sarcastic).