La voie lactée

Two impoverished hobos travel on foot through France, en route to Santiago-de-Compostella, in Spain. They are on a spiritual pilgrimage. Along the way they walk into one self-contained story, absorb its value, then leave, only to walk into another self-contained story. The film's structure is thus episodic. And each episode or vignette highlights a parable about some facet of religious belief.

The encounters are set in different eras of history, as for example the time of the life of Christ, or the fourth century A.D. In each little story, inhabitants pontificate their certainty of religious belief that often contradicts other beliefs held with just as much certainty. Thus, differences in abstract religious dogma translate into aggressive and militaristic behavior, to stamp out opposing beliefs.

Throughout the dialectic narrative, a central theme seems to be the casting of doubt on old, rigid belief systems in general, and those of the Catholic Church in particular.

Visuals are competent, though fairly conventional. The script is talky. Acting and dialogue trend stagy and stilted. Music is irrelevant.

Aimed at an audience of the intellectually curious, "The Milky Way" is a message film that can be frustrating for viewers who want everything spelled out clearly. And that's the whole point. Contradictions and logical fallacies in belief systems ensure absolutely a lack of clarity; hence, a narrative journey, or way, that is confusing, opaque, cloudy, or ... milky.

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.

This masterpiece is Bunuel at his best. It draws from the confrontational and revolutionary fire present in his Mexican films like "Il Brute", the intelligent and informed humor of his earlier religious farce, "Simon of The Desert", and I believe serves as a living picture of the transition his work seemed to under go between the more vivid and shocking Dali inspired surrealism of his early carrer (the obvious example being "Un Chien Andalou") and the more subtle and organic magical-realist influenced surrealism of "That Obscure Object of Desire". This film is certainly not light however. While there are no razor blindings or ant infested ears, the pope does fall victim to a firing squad of radicals. In fact I believe Bunuel succeds in leaving the viewer much more disgusted and upset by confronting him with the stark realities of the Catholic faith, and after all isn't that what surrealism is all about? It must be said that in order to understand and appreciate this film one must have a very good understanding of a variety of religious thinkers and of the history/practices of the catholic church. If you don't have such a background but are still lucky enough to get a chance to view this film, by all means take it, more likely than not it will inspire you to investigate the matter further and Bunuel conveniently mentions the names of all most all the writers he references in the film so take that list to a library, read up and watch it again, you won't be disappointed.

There are two Bunuels: the cheeky Bunuel who makes movies filled with blatant symbolism and surrealism attacking religion and sexuality, and the narrative Bunuel, who makes more subtle films which approach these same issues in more mature ways.

The first Bunuel, the Bunuel of L'Age D'Or and Un Chien Andalou, was definitely at work on this project. The coherent narratives of Los Olivados, Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, Exterminating Angel or even Discrete Charm of the Bourgoise.

Bunuel loved ambiguity and abstraction. He loved making people feel uncertain of things in all his movies - yet many of them maintain a serene, smooth surface nonetheless - there may be dream sequences in them, and things out of the ordinary happening, yet they don't jump around in the madcap way this movie and L'Age D'Or do, constantly making the viewer adjust to a new scene with seemingly no relation to the last, which is afterwards resolved when the pilgrims appear and reinstate continuity.

The two pilgrim characters are our tour guides through a patchwork of historical vignettes involving important religious events.

The highlight of the film for me was when a priest is talking to a man and a woman through a locked door, locked on the advice of the innkeeper presumably to keep the chaplin from coming into their rooms and preaching to them, and the chaplin is talking to them about how Mary could have given birth and remained a virgin. He thinks of an example of this: like light coming through a window. Bunuel cuts from the priest sitting outside the room to the couple inside the room, and suddenly the priest is sitting inside the room talking to he couple. In the next shot, he is outside, and the following shot, inside again. A superb example of cinematic irony.

I'm actually not quite sure what i thought of the film - its certainly not among my favourite Bunuels (Discrete Charm of the Bourgoisie, Exterminating Angel, Los Olivados, L'Age D'Or), but its the sort of film that clearly rewards repeat viewings. As another reviewer commented, a knowledge of religious history reaped rich rewards from it, which makes me wish i knew a little more than i did.

Clifford's Commendations: Like with any Bunuel film, if you're christian, and you get it, you won't like it! If you're not christian, it'll help if you know some christian history to get all the laughs and satire on offer. Without this knowledge, from personal experience, the film has fruits to offer, but you won't enjoy it as much as many other Bunuels.

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.