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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bunuel at the top of his form, August 23, 2003
Another great work by Luis Bunuel, The Phantom of Liberty has more outright humor in it than probably any of his other films. When the private and public functions of eating and evacuating are reversed, and monks congregate in a room to watch a man get spanked by a dominatrix, and a soldier passionately kisses a statue, and a haughty professor's butt gets tagged with a full-of-pins paper cutout by some immature cadets, you know you're having fun.Here it really seems as though Bunuel was essentially making fun of his own intense desire to engage in biting satire, because the feeling is much more of letting loose with some laugh-out-loud antics rather than the need to mercilessly slash and burn social conventions. This is a much lighter film than one would typically expect from Bunuel, and yet that is not at all related to its significance. It's a sharp piece of cinema, full of irreverence that, as many have already indicated, is closer to Monty Python than anything else. Bunuel's sense of fun here does not require a plot, just as many of his other films don't. But in this film the lack of formal narrative actually seems to work better than in several of his other works; we keep waiting for the next scene to see if it will top what we've just seen--regardless whether there's logic in the seguing or not (there almost always isn't). A lot of fun and very highly recommended.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exhilarating satirical surrealist show from Luis Buñuel, October 1, 2005
I'm told by fellow film enthusiasts that Buñuel's later films do not show this Spanish master at his best, that his earliest films---his famous collaborations with Salvador Dalí, for instance---show an edgier, more fascinating Buñuel. Whatever. I saw his 1974 film THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY for the first time recently, and I immediately fell in love with it. There are those who swear by his more popular 1972 Oscar-winner THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, but somehow I think THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY is even more entertaining than DISCREET CHARM.
There is no plot to speak of in PHANTOM: this film is basically a collection of surrealist sketches that finds Buñuel playing with all kinds of different ideas and different images. Monks pray for a woman's sick father, and then play poker with the woman and smoke. A group of people sit around a dinner table on toilets, and go to the bathroom to eat in private. Two parents desperately try to find their missing daughter---even though she's right there in class when they call her name. In the universe Buñuel concocts in THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY, anything goes.
The amazing thing about this movie is that, instead of seeming like an irrational series of surrealistic sketches, THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY has a broad theme to support its free-form structure: it's Buñuel's comic vision of freedom run amuck. Sure, the idea of liberty is appealing to everyone...but, as Buñuel seems to be suggesting, even freedom has its limits. The opening scene of the movie is set in Toledo, Spain in 1808, as Napoleon's troops attempt to liberate the Spanish and are greeted with cries of "Down with liberty!" There can be times when we want the assurance of authority, rather than the freedom to act in whatever way we please.
Buñuel doesn't take a stand one way or the other, really; he's just an artist who is intrigued by the idea, and his interest fuels the free-form structure of the film, and its content. Almost anything and everything he can think of---within the bounds, I suppose, of the same themes he covered throughout his long and illustrious film career---is thrown into this movie, and while some viewers may perhaps prefer the comfort of a movie with some structure, I found its elegant chaos exhilarating.
Only a master filmmaker who had absolute confidence in what he was doing would dare make a movie like this. I think Buñuel pulls it off triumphantly here; somehow, he makes the movie seem almost logical, the way it progresses. THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY is a sheer delight. Highly recommended.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins out and waves new patterns.", March 15, 2007
This excellent collection of satirical vignettes is my kind of movie - crazy, dark and comical, it goes any direction it wants and does not follow any rules. When we try to grasp for the meaning, it is like a ghost, a phantom that "leaves us with a wisp of vapor in our hands" and disappears - very much like the liberty, the freedom the humans try to find but instead could only see its phantom disappearing. The film follows many characters on its way shifting effortlessly and playfully from the central ones to the minor ones making minor ones the central and going back and forth from one time period to another. It opens in Toledo during the Napoleonic occupation then jumps to the modern day Paris. It could've gone anywhere and introduced me to any character - it still would've been enormously interesting because it was made by the master who had never lost his curiosity, his inquisitive mind, his memory that consisted of the strange and amazing images, his sense of humor, his childhood dreams, his fantasies, dark and shining and who was able to throw them all on the screen like no one ever was able or will be able to do. To understand Bunuel completely would be as impossible as to catch the Phantom of Liberty - he will be always one of the best and unsolved mysteries in the Art of Cinema.
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