La voie lactée

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.

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.

Le fantôme de la liberté (Buñuel, 1974) seems to take off right from this film as if it were a sequel, visually and conceptually. This film however is much more determined to denounce the contradictions and hypocrisy of different religions, while Fantôme has even more artistic freedom. Also this is much more coherent and if there is any danger of getting heavy-handed, Buñuel knows how to joke himself a way out using illusionism or a mild shock-treatment. It is simultaneously very rational and miraculous. The anti-clericism and subversive desires frequently come to the surreal surface. I can't help but see this as an inspiration for Monty Python's 'Life of Brian' (1979), because that film also remotely feels like an off the wall road movie in which anything can happen.

The subject matter was sort of tough for an atheist (heretic?) like me, but the humour with which Buñuel lets the characters throw the crucial differences between religions at each other is hilarious. E.g. in the middle of a duel between a Catholic and a Jesuit: 'Prior will is mere impulse. My thoughts and my will are not in my own power ... ma liberte est un fantôme.' 'What does freedom mean anyway? How can I be free if what I do is determined in advance?' etc. And why would all the personnel of a restaurant be caught up in an eloquent discussion about the existence of God while they are at work? See for yourself. Cinematographer Christian Matras (also Le Grande Illusion, 1937) continues to improve Buñuel's visual style using zoom-pan-zoom shots for instance, but keeps it sober.

9/10

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.