The Phantom of Liberty, in essence, is not a single film in the traditional sense, as Buñuel moves away from cinematic convention by breaking the rules of filmmaking.  The principal distinction from other films is that Buñuel draws the audience's attention to the film by presenting an idea that he slowly makes more interesting by introducing additional stimuli that build up the intrigue.  However, when the intrigue enters the climax Buñuel simply leaves the story where it become most stimulating.  At this point he starts over with another less interesting story that moves forward with new intrigue that once again intensifies, and as before he tosses away the intrigue by starting over.

One of these stories within the film opens with "I'm sick of symmetry.", as a man sits down watching the fireplace and a large preserved spider.  The man stands up while picking up the spider, as he shortly after slides the clock above the fireplace to the left and places the spider on the right.  This scene has nothing to do with what is about to happen, but it offers a brilliant analogy to how simple it is for Buñuel to break the chains of cinematic convention in this film.  Yet, the film has a common thread that continues throughout the film, which brings to mind Marquis de Sade's literary works.  Much of the film offers suggestive sexual and erotic situations where some are more overt than others.

The opening of the film takes place in 1808 during Napoleon's occupation of Toledo where the French Army executes captured resistance while the officers are getting drunk within a church.  One of these drunk officers finds a sculpture of a kneeling woman attractive with which he tries to make advances on, but to the audience's astonishment the male kneeling statue next to him stops the officer with a resolute smack to the head.  This is one of several scenes in the film where a character presents deviant sexual behavior.  There is also the man who advances on a prepubescent girl on the playground, the family that defecates in the living room, and the four monks that play poker with the lady in a nightgown.  None of these scenes are explicit in nature, but the mere situation provides strong suggestive notion of the sexually tense moments that also have strong surreal ambiance.

Each moment in the film surrounds a surreal element that causes a cerebral conflict.  These moments seem dreamlike, but with enough reality to keep the audience guessing of what will happen next.  For example, there is a man who tries to go to sleep and is visited by an enormous rooster, a candle carrying woman, a postman who delivers a letter, and an emu.  Later, the man visits a doctor, as he found the night extremely disturbing to which the doctor responds that he must see a psychoanalyst.  To convince the doctor the man shows the letter that he received from the postman that visited him during the night in his bedroom.  Cleverly, Buñuel displays the workings of the surreal in the subconscious, as he let reality converge with dream.  This makes it more difficult for the audience to separate the two, as they simply fall into what seems to be a blender that mixes anything that falls inside.

Visually The Phantom of Liberty offers something like a stroll through an art museum's section with surrealism, which suggests that Luis Buñuel is not simply a film director trying to tell a story in the traditional sense.  Through Buñuel's direction the audience can experience a plasticity in the manner the film moves along, but it is idiosyncratic in contrasts to the other cinematic geniuses such as Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bergman among others.  It is the peculiarity of Buñuel that makes him unique, as he did not try to do what has already been made.  Instead he took the step into the unexplored and brought back from the deepest corners of the human psyche several experiences that none have ever been able to match.  Thus, the Phantom of Liberty offers a distillation of Buñuel himself.

DIRECTED BY

COUNTRY

Italy / France

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