Buñuel’s final masterwork depicts Fernando Rey as a wealthy hidalgo who, whilst journeying from Seville to Paris, seeks to take stock of his sadomasochistic relationship with young Conchita. Her chicanery and cruel mocking of the eccentric old libertine is recounted in flashbacks as she sexually subjugates her frustrated pursuer, cuckolding him through an impossibly knotted chastity belt. Not even the iconic goatee beard of Fernando Rey, whose French voice is dubbed by Michel Piccoli, is enough to secure him the sexual release that he pursues like a randy buck.
This, the sixth film adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin (1898), develops the portrayal of obsession and fetishism established by Viridiana (1961) and Tristana (1970) in a style reminiscent of Vertigo. However, the film’s masterstroke is in its casting. Maria Schneider, the original Conchita, almost completely derailed the production but Buñuel – in a fit of desperation and fuelled by two dry Martinis – had a barroom epiphany and replaced one actress with two. The random switching between actresses Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina adds, to an otherwise conventional story, a mystery that defies all explanation and various obscure objects of desire. With his chronic concupiscence and saggy wrinkled genitals this oppressive, coercive, thwarted old man is no innocent victim, as the orgasmic bombs of leftist terrorists explode on the fringes of his pursuit. Accompanied by the music of Wagner, Buñuel’s magnificent career ends contrary to how T.S. Eliot would put it, ‘not with a whimper but a bang’.
Lauri Timonen