That Obscure Object of Desire

(Cet obscur objet du désir, Luis Buñuel, France/Spain, 1977)

Denuded

That Obscure Object of Desire is often referred to as Luis Buñuel’s testament work, the apotheosis of a lifetime. But it is also absolutely of its historic moment: 1977, the glorious season of punk.

The director, almost entirely deaf and also going blind at the time, may not have been avidly listening to Johnny Rotten, but he certainly remained well attuned to the state of the world: its random, chaotic and senseless acts of violence, the alienation of individuals, the dysfunctional breakdown in relationships.

In what he probably realised would be his last movie, Buñuel went for broke. Can’t you just imagine the sarcastic invocation of a “Revolutionary Army of the Baby Jesus” – Buñuel’s Monty Pythonesque shorthand for international terrorist groups – in the snarled lyrics of a Sex Pistols song?

In fact, even that outlandish joke morphed (as the film’s co-writer, Jean-Claude Carrière [1931-2021], tells us) into a reality the very moment it was scripted: a bomb was detonated in Paris’ Sacré-Cœur basilica “by a group claiming to act in the name of Baby Jesus”!

It starts with perfectly banal, quasi-documentary, hand-held street shots, and ends with an explosion in which the central characters die. As if Buñuel, for his final film, is making a sovereign statement: I can begin any way I please, and I can blow it up any time I like. In between, we observe a tale that might run forever, in infinite repetitions and variations.

Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is obsessed with Conchita (played in alternation by Ángela Molina and Carole Bouquet). His propensity for old-fashioned, romantic love is a moot point, but his compulsion to sexually possess Conchita is loud, clear and persistent – it’s virtually a pathological syndrome.

Conchita, however, is just as persistent in her refusal. She avows her love, moves in with him, shares a bed with him – but no sex. The lengths to which Conchita will go to preserve her virginity give Buñuel the opportunity to carve out one of his finest set-pieces: the revelation of her ingeniously customised chastity belt.

Buñuel himself worried that this story would not work in in the modern age of feminism, contraception and more or less liberated sexual mores. (A looming Zeitgeist that Robert Bresson was still able to ignore in 1969 for his Dostoevsky adaptation, Une femme douce.) He considered retaining the late 19th century setting of the original 1898 short tale by Pierre Louÿs (1870-1925) for greater believability.

Thankfully, his faithful producer since 1963, Serge Silberman (1917-2003), talked him out of that. This seeming anachronism at the heart of That Obscure Object is what, ultimately, gives the film its surrealist power of dislocation and estrangement.

It is as if Buñuel pierces the veil of our contemporaneity in order to say: you think things are so different, now, between men and women? I’ll show you how little has really changed! The film exposes and explores, with dark satire, the culturally enduring codes of macho (for men) and romantic love (for women). But with a twist: Conchita is no submissive plaything for Mathieu, and her ongoing analysis of the logic of his compulsive behaviour carries a militant sting of truth.

Fernando Rey was almost four decades older than his switched-around co-stars. But Buñuel does not aim for a prurient or titillating presentation of Mathieu’s fixation on Conchita. The film (picking up where his El [1953] left off) offers a merciless, hilarious takedown of masculine behaviour and presumptions – setting Mathieu into the trap of this impossible relationship, and leaving him there to squirm in agony.

Rey has some of the greatest moments of his long career projecting the abject frustration of Mathieu, in comedic outbursts careening from exasperation to perplexity, anger to abject frustration.

That Obscure Object is often taken as the crowning point of a trilogy, after The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Certainly, there is much to connect it with the two previous films, particularly the recurring presence of actors including Rey, Julien Bertheau and Muni.

It more accurately belongs, however, in another line of Buñuel’s work, alongside The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and Tristana (1970) – that’s to say, adaptations of the somewhat scandalous novels he read and cherished in his youth, nurtured as projects in his mind for decades until he had the opportunity to finally realise them.

That Obscure Object, under the title of La femme et le pantin (“Woman and Puppet”), in fact almost went ahead in 1957, and would have done so if the producer had not insisted on casting Brigitte Bardot over Buñuel’s preferred choice of Mylène Demongeot.

“Woman and Puppet” is the title of the Louÿs story on which That Obscure Object is based. It has given rise to four screen adaptations, the other most famous version (apart from Buñuel’s) being Josef von Sternberg’s final collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, The Devil is a Woman (1935).

Buñuel and Carrière freely discarded, expanded and transposed elements of the text (there is no story told during a train ride in Louÿs), but some plot details remain exactly alike: Mathieu’s attempt to “buy” Conchita from her mother, Encarnación (María Asquerino), the curt note he consequently receives, and the discovery of the women’s sudden evacuation from their apartment is all straight out of the original.

Where Sternberg seemed to identify wholly with the masochistic suffering of his male alter ego (played by Lionel Atwill), Buñuel steps back, dispassionately – if anything, he spreads around the masochism (as well as the sadism) democratically, as it afflicts, in different ways, both man and woman.

Search all you want for a male gaze in That Obscure Object. There’s female nudity (set against Mathieu’s almost always clothed and fully covered body), but it’s casual, matter-of-fact, in motion, never fetishised or fixed as spectacle. Its part and parcel of the punk tenor of the project that the story has been deliberately leeched of all the conventional tropes of voyeurism, suspense, amorous intrigue. Brian De Palma could do a great version of it, but this is nothing like a De Palma (or Hitchcock) special.

It’s no wonder so many commentators of the time found themselves summing up That Obscure Object by taking recourse to the 1970s adage of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel”. (Buñuel and Lacan in fact met each other at a special Cinémathèque française screening – for psychoanalysts! – of El, a work that Lacan frequently referred to admiringly in his seminars.) That grim motto has come to mean, roughly: there is no possible relationship between men and women that can ever be genuine or reciprocal, because the cultural differences of internalised gender roles are simply too great to surmount.

But there is also, for Buñuel as much as for Lacan, something eternal, something universally human, in this perpetually out-of-phase attempt at emotional alignment that is forever doomed to fail – and thus grotesque and absurd in its hopeless, unstoppable repetition.

So, the infernal Mathieu/Conchita scenario is virtually a comical Battle of the Sexes – of the kind that filled light movie and TV entertainments in the 1950s – taken to a delirious, nightmarish extreme. Women and men both are the obscure objects in each other’s clouded vision.

Jean-Pierre Oudart, an influential theorist of Cahiers du cinema in the 1960s and ‘70s heavily influenced by Lacanian thought, was amazed and delighted to encounter in That Obscure Object a film so determinedly void of the usual cinematic games designed to lure and seduce a target audience. He saw it as a movie not of erotic striptease, but radical denuding. Not only the bodies and characters, but also the expected themes and meanings, as well as the cinematic style and manner, are cut right down to the bone – and chillingly so.

Buñuel had, since Belle de jour (1967), become the master of an unfussy, fluid, highly elegant style fusing camera movements, design elements, and the gestural work of the actors. Here, however, he simplified this mode further, to the point of crystalline purity.

Oudart may have overstated the despairing coldness while understating the humorous jolt provided by That Obscure Object. But it’s certainly true that Buñuel displays a certain indifference toward the story he is spinning, or at least toward its expected quotient of baseline realism. For instance: what does Mathieu do for a living, where does his money come from? The film couldn’t care less about specifying or filling in such details (the opposite approach to, say, François Truffaut).

Even when there’s ambiguity surrounding Conchita and her motives – the prodigious ability of her and Encarnación to extract money from Mathieu, the constantly suspicious appearance of a young, guitar-strumming pal nicknamed El Morenito (David Rocha) – it all seems to disappear in a flourish, banished off-screen when no longer strictly required.

Likewise, Buñuel appears to impishly enjoy the spinning out of a very 19th century-style frame story or embedded flashback device – Mathieu in a crowded train carriage, entertaining an assorted crew of listeners (including two kids and a little person played by Piéral) with his tale of woe – before offhandedly dropping it to get to the explosive finale.

And then there’s the double-act of Molina and Bouquet. This, alongside the non-modernising of Louÿs’ original tale, is the other grand master stroke of That Obscure Object. Accounts vary as to when and how, exactly, the idea of casting two different actors as Conchita arose; the director, the producer and co-writer all recall it slightly differently.

According to Carrière, it was already in the script, applied and then discarded before production began. The idea returned – to the mind of either Buñuel or Silberman – once the shoot was abruptly shut down due to the director’s difficulty with Maria Schneider in the role of Conchita. (An odd evocation of this on-set trouble, featuring an actor who looks absolutely nothing like Buñuel, appears in Jessica Palud’s clumsy biopic Maria aka Being Maria [2024].)

The two Conchitas – and the differences between them – can be studied forever. “They’re not just two facets of one woman”, mused Raymond Durgnat. “They’re different women. Differences of physique become differences of style, differences of style become class differences. The brunette is classically proletarian, the blonde is characteristically petit bourgeois …”

An inspired idea indeed – but what’s it all about? For Carrière in his brilliant, pedagogical book The Secret Language of Film, it’s an ironic game with filmic conventions and the sedimented conventions of spectatorship – almost a punk-style dare. (Buñuel flaunts the double-casting in the opening credits by cheekily ‘animating’ the on-screen names of the two actors.) Molina and Bouquet were expertly dubbed by a third actor (Florence Giorgetti) who sonically “bridged” their differences, but those differences (in looks, style, manner, social class) insist, right there on the screen.

So, the dare runs as follows: if the actors are swapped, even in the middle of a single scene, without any overt underlining of the fact, and if the normal codes of mise en scène and editing are fastidiously respected, will anybody actually notice the switch?

Carrière’s rather rueful conclusion: “A good half of the spectators saw nothing. A post-screening poll in an American university indicated that 70% of the students had not spotted the difference”. The sad lesson he draws from this concerns “the degree to which our eyes can remain unseeing for more than an hour and a half as a result of the almost frightening power of our habits of perception, our secret rejection of the out-of the-ordinary, of all that upsets and disconcerts”.

Carrière also records the response of a friend who thought there was “something odd” about the film, but couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was. That sensation of niggling oddness – the hallmark of many Buñuel movies – was surely what the director was counting on. And the effect proves to be contagious, spreading through every level of the work.

Even the character names: perhaps inspired by Louÿs’ lilting rhapsody on “Concepción, Concha, Conchita, Chita”, Mathieu swiftly becomes (whenever it’s Molina’s turn at the wheel) Mateo. In fact, That Obscure Object is a co-production that never ceases mixing up its deliberately clichéd markers of Frenchness and Spanishness. Buñuel, once more, seems to be thumbing his nose at us: you want the exotic, touristic, continental icons of a Carlos Saura-style “art film”? Well, take this! Paris streets, flamenco in Sevilla …

In 1980, Buñuel reflected that, in a political world ruled by mass media, “anguish is absolute and confusion total”. But there is bad confusion and good confusion in a Surrealist-inspired film like That Obscure Object. Good confusion is when things come unstuck from their singular, fixed form or function – like those markers of national or ethnic identity. On another level, what might be clearly signalled as symbols or metaphors throughout – the sacks that are carried around (do they hide bombs?), the animals that pass through (reminders of our base, bestial selves), the money that is endlessly exchanged (human life reduced to a mere market commodity) – seem to empty themselves of meaning the more they recur.

It’s a tease or, rather, another denuding; Oudart spoke of it as “the incongruity of objects, of signifiers rendered stupid because they lack any perspective provided by the fiction”. To put that more simply, Buñuel loves to nudge us to notice all kinds of details, echoes, symmetries and inversions he has evidently placed in his film – but then he appears to chide us for investing such things with profound significance. You can almost hear him mocking the audience from behind the camera: the psychologist is a little person … so what? It can happen, you know!

This was the same jovial attitude that Buñuel often expressed, for example in his splendid autobiography My Last Sigh: “Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du cinéma”. However, the penultimate apparition in That Obscure Object – a scene so important to Buñuel that he retuned, after the scheduled shoot, to re-film it – can still rattle us.

A woman sits in a shop window and calmly, methodically sews up a piece of lace. The image raises so many poetic associations: virginity, the hymen, innocence lost but paradoxically restored – another impossible fantasy.

Buñuel once again confided to Silberman his doubt during the shooting of this scene: “Serge, if I put blood on the lace, there’ll be critics who say Conchita has lost her virginity”. And as it turned out, his prediction was correct.

But Buñuel stuck to the conviction that something more mysterious, infinitely suggestive was condensed here. Silberman put it well: the scene is a mixture of contradictory elements, romanticism plus horror, doubt plus longing. “There’s the beauty of the lacemaker”, he commented. “The graceful movement of her hand. And finally comes the bombing”.

MORE Buñuel: Un Chien andalou, Abismos de pasión

© Adrian Martin July/September 2020 (+ 2025 update)