That Obscure Object of Desire: Desire, Denuded

Then there’s the double act of Molina and Bouquet. This, alongside the relative nonmodernizing of Louÿs’s original tale, is the other grand masterstroke of That Obscure Object. Accounts vary as to when and how, exactly, the idea of casting two different actors as Conchita arose; director, producer, and cowriter 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 on account of the director’s difficulty working with Maria Schneider in the role.

An inspired conceit indeed, but what’s it all about? For Carrière, it represents an ironic game with filmic conventions and the ossified conventions of spectatorship—almost a punk-style dare (Buñuel flaunts the double casting even in the 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 vocally bridged their differences, but those differences—in looks, style, manner, national origin, 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 postscreening poll in an American university indicated that 70 percent of the students had not spotted the difference.”

“Buñuel loves to nudge us to notice all kinds of details, echoes, symmetries, and inversions—but then he appears to chide us for investing such things with profound significance.”

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 nagging 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 to the character names: Mathieu swiftly becomes Mateo whenever it’s Molina’s turn at the wheel. In fact, That Obscure Object is a French-Spanish coproduction that never ceases mixing up its deliberately clichéd markers of both Frenchness and Spanishness. Buñuel, once more, seems to be thumbing his nose at us: You want the exotic, touristic icons of a certain kind of European “art film”? Well, take this! Paris streets, flamenco in Seville . . .

On another level, what might be clearly signaled as symbols or metaphors throughout the film—the sacks that are carried around (do they hide bombs?), the animals that wander through (reminders of our base, bestial selves), the money that is endlessly exchanged (life reduced to a mere market force)—seem to empty themselves of meaning the more they recur. It’s a tease or, rather, another denuding; Oudart spoke of “the incongruity of objects, of signifiers rendered stupid.” 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.

This was the same puckish attitude that Buñuel often expressed, for example in his splendid 1982 autobiography, My Last Sigh: “Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du cinema.” However, the penultimate apparition in That Obscure Object—a scene so important to Buñuel that he returned, after the scheduled shoot, to refilm it—can still rattle us. A woman sits in a shopwindow and calmly and methodically sews up a piece of lace on which a trace of blood is evident. The image raises so many poetic associations: virginity, the hymen, innocence lost but paradoxically restored—another impossible fantasy. During the shooting of this scene, Buñuel once again confided to Silberman his doubt: “Serge, if I put blood on the lace, there’ll be critics who say Conchita has lost her virginity.”

As it turned out, his prediction was correct. But Buñuel stuck to the conviction that something more mysterious and suggestive was condensed here. Silberman put it well in a 1979 Film Quarterly interview: the scene is a mixture of contradictory elements— romanticism plus horror, doubt plus longing. “There’s the beauty of the lace maker,” he commented. “The graceful movement of her hand. And finally comes the bombing.”

That Obscure Object traces an extraordinary journey from its opening images to this indelible finale. The film begins with perfectly banal, quasi-documentary, handheld 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 everything up any time I like. Luis Buñuel, proto-punk to the very end.