not that kind of woman
by
Douglas Messerli
Luis
Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière (writers, based on the novel by Pierre Louÿs La Femme et le Pantin), Luis Buñuel Cet obscur objet du désir (Ese oscuro objeto del deseo) (That Obscure Object of Desire) / 1977
Luis
Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object
of Desire, is also one of his most satirically charming, a least if you
read it from a rather feminist perspective. Written from a novel by Pierre
Louÿs, the work had already been brought to film in Frank Lloyd’s The Woman and the Puppet, in Jacques de
Baroncelli’s 1928 movie, and in Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman in 1935, staring Marlene Dietrich (one might
even argue that The Blue Angel of
1930
had been a restatement of these themes).
Julien Duvivier reused it yet again for his The
Female, starring Brigitte Bardot, in 1959. Yet, as one might suspect from
this director, the earlier versions are quite different from Buñuel’s vision.
In this series of reencounters, Mathieu
increasingly ups the ante by spending lavishly on the woman Conchita (played in
this director’s version by two different actors, Carole Bouquet and Ángela
Molina), eventually luring her into his bed, and finally even offering her a pension of her own. But through all of
these events, Conchita—maintaining that she is “not that kind of girl”—keeps
her “virginity,” leaving the elderly admirer pining for her body, “that obscure
object” of his “desire.”
It is only after he rediscovers her in
Seville dancing flamenco in a small cafe, where in a back room she also dances
it for tourists completely naked, that he realizes her lies. Even then,
after giving her the key to her own pension, she taunts him by having sex
with her handsome young accompanist—after attempting to deny it once again by
describing the boy as a homosexual who merely acted out the lovemaking. It is
only on that occasion that Mathieu finally realizes how he has been deceived
time and again, and it is that realization, after he beats her, which occasions
his train trip to Paris and the telling of his story.
After all of the harrying events he has
described, however, and, at the end of the voyage Mathieu discovers Conchita
has been able to get on the same train, he starts up yet a new friendship with
her—although by this time it has become hard to imagine what the nature of that
relationship might be. Certainly, if there is to finally be a marriage, it will
be a bloody one, as we witness in a store window, near where the couple are strolling,
a seamstress knitting a delicate headdress to which is attached a bloody veil.
What Conchita shows him is that he can
never truly “acquire” the heart of a woman, particularly a woman as complex and
truly independent as she is. Even if there had been a marriage, it would only
again light a fuse, as when he has previously beaten Conchita. In short, in
Buñuel’s telling the political and the sexual are completely intertwined, a
fact that a man like Mathieu could never possibly come to perceive.
A sudden explosion at film’s end, wherein
the strolling couple is presumably killed, makes that link clear. The struggles
between this old man and young woman can only end in an explosion of cultural
and political differences, resulting in their own immolation.
Los Angeles, April
3, 2017
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