That Obscure Object of Desire

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) was the last film of Luis Buñuel's extraordinary career, and a fitting last word from cinema's great surrealist: a sly, savage comedy of erotic frustration that earned two Academy Award nominations. He adapted it with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, his partner on several earlier films, and it returns to a theme that had occupied him for decades, the impossibility of possessing what one wants.

Fernando Rey plays the wealthy older man consumed by his obsession with the elusive Conchita, who is played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. They swap from scene to scene without explanation, an audacious stroke that makes the woman herself unknowable. Around the couple's cruel games Buñuel scatters absurd outbreaks of terrorism and violence, and he treats bourgeois desire and a world coming apart with the same deadpan irony.

It was a critical triumph, the crown of the late renaissance Buñuel enjoyed in France, and it folds a lifetime's preoccupations (frustrated longing, social hypocrisy, the irrational beneath the respectable) into one elegant, unsettling film. Theorists and film-makers have been picking over the two-actress conceit ever since, and it still works on an audience. As a farewell, That Obscure Object of Desire is entirely in character: witty, mysterious, teasing and never resolved, the work of a director who did not stop surprising people.