That Obscure Object of Desire

The final film of Luis Buñuel's extraordinary career, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is a fitting last word from the cinema's great surrealist — a sly, savage comedy of erotic frustration that earned two Academy Award nominations. Adapted, like several of his films, with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, it returns to a theme that had preoccupied Buñuel for decades: the impossibility of possessing what one wants.

Fernando Rey plays the wealthy older man undone by his obsession with the elusive Conchita — famously portrayed by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, switching between scenes without explanation, an audacious stroke that makes the woman herself unknowable. Around their cruel dance Buñuel scatters absurd irruptions of terrorism and violence, treating bourgeois desire and a world coming apart with the same deadpan irony.

A critical triumph that crowned the late renaissance Buñuel enjoyed in France, the film distils a lifetime's preoccupations — frustrated longing, social hypocrisy, the irrational beneath the respectable — into one elegant, unsettling package. Its twin-actress conceit has fascinated film-makers and theorists ever since. Witty, mysterious and quietly explosive, That Obscure Object of Desire sends one of cinema's true originals out on a perfectly characteristic note of teasing, unresolvable enigma. The twin-actress conceit has been pored over by theorists and film-makers ever since, a final flourish from a director who never stopped surprising.