Tuesday, July 12, 2011

L'Age d'Or (1930) Luis Buñuel



Following their classic experimental and surrealist short film, Un chien andalou (1929), directors Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí came together one last time to create a deliriously surreal, provocative, and blasphemous take on l’amour fou and the constraints of a stultifying, oppressive society. Wryly beginning with a documentary on the poisonous power of scorpions and irrationally moving towards a peasant revolution (led by famed surrealist painter Max Ernst) that comically withers and collapses before even sighting the enemy, the film jumps to its giddy, strange center: a passionate, lustful tryst torn apart by society, politics, class, and public morality. Surreal social satire rears its head to thwart the lovers’ reunion as decadent party-goers require our male hero (Gaston Modot) to meet-and-greet them politely as his lover (Lya Lys) waits, aroused and baffled, just a few feet away. As the rest of the world strives to keep them apart, sexual desire is displaced by fetishes: the man becomes enamored over a statue’s toe (and his girl begins sucking it when torn apart from him), and in one of cinema’s most enraptured moments, the woman gazes, dreamily in love but unable to spy her lover, into her boudoir mirror and sees a reflection of a cloudy sky.

A simple love story this is not. Buñuel and Dalí cram as much insanity, criticism, and manic energy into their gleeful cinematic broadside as they possible can. A violin is callously kicked down a street; our hero, the “Ambassador of Good Will,” boots a puppy, crushes a beetle, and knocks down a blind man; the clergy rot and turn to skeletons alone on a beach; and a Sade-like orgy takes place in a castle presided over by Jesus—these are just a few of L’Âge d’or‘s wicked swipes of humorous hatred and bizarre parody of a complacent, conventional society. Skewering everything from Catholic piety to sexual fetishism, the film provoked riots, was denounced by Mussolini’s ambassador, earned its backer a threat of excommunication and was banned by the French Police all within two weeks of its release. In its provocation and brilliant, associative creativity this film still shocks and surprises as much as the day it premiered, and shows perhaps how little the world has changed in over 70 years.

Imdb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021577/

Movie
http://veehd.com/video/4636264_Age-o...French-EngSubs