Movie · 1977 · Comedy, Drama, Romance · 1h 43m · R · French
Curator score: 8.5/10 (66.1K ratings)
Luis Buñuel's masterpiece
Overview
After dumping a bucket of water on a beautiful young woman from the window of a train car, wealthy Frenchman Mathieu, regales his fellow passengers with the story of the dysfunctional relationship between himself and the young woman in question, a fiery 19-year-old flamenco dancer named Conchita. What follows is a tale of cruelty, depravity and lies -- the very building blocks of love.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.5/10
IMDb: 7.8/10
Letterboxd: 3.99/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
Metacritic: 84
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Luis Buñuel
Production
Incine, Greenwich Film Production, Les Films Galaxie
Cast
Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Ángela Molina, Julien Bertheau, André Weber, Milena Vukotić, María Asquerino, Ellen Bahl, Valerie Blanco, Auguste Carrière, Jacques Debary, Antonio Duque, André Lacombe, Lita Lluch-Peiro, Annie Monange, Jean-Claude Montalban, Muni, Bernard Musson, Piéral, Isabelle Rattier
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp, mischievous late Buñuel film that turns a doomed erotic obsession into a comic study of class, cruelty, and self-deception. Its formal trick of splitting Conchita across two actresses deepens the film’s instability and makes the romance feel like a moving target rather than a simple love story.
Best for
Viewers who like caustic relationship dramas
Fans of surreal or anti-romantic cinema
People interested in class satire and sexual power games
Audiences open to elliptical, playful formal experiments
Skip if
You want a straightforward romance
You dislike ambiguity and narrative games
You are put off by misogynistic behavior or emotional cruelty
You prefer emotionally warm or conventionally cathartic films
Overview
Buñuel’s final film is one of his most elegant provocations: a bourgeois man recounts a love affair that is really a long exercise in humiliation, bargaining, and self-mythology. The setup is simple, but the film keeps slipping away from certainty, especially through the uncanny casting of two actresses as Conchita, which turns desire itself into something unstable and performative.
Worth noting
What makes it endure is the balance of wit and menace. The film is funny, but the jokes are barbed; it is erotic, but never generous; it is political, but never preachy. Buñuel uses the relationship to expose class vanity, male entitlement, and the way people turn longing into a private religion.
Bottom line
It’s not a romance in any comforting sense. It’s a dissection of obsession that remains stylish, strange, and very alive, with a final stretch that lands like a cruel punchline and a perfect summation of Buñuel’s worldview.
Top Letterboxd reviews
KYK · 1337 likes
Roses are redMathieu's balls are blueAt first I was confusedWho the fuck was who
35mm. Metrograph.
cassandra (3.5★) · 1119 likes
Lana Del Rey's favorite movie, probably.
Carlos Valladares (5★) · 977 likes
"If I gave you what you wanted now, you'd stop loving me."
So says Conchita, the mercurial-virginal Spanish dancer mysteriously played by two women in Luis Buñuel's final masterpiece Cet Obscur Objet du Désir. When Conchita says this, she's played by the frigid French actress Carole Bouquet. (Without a warning, Coach Buñuel will substitute spicy Spanish senorita Angela Molina in for QB Bouquet.) Bouquet/Molina teases the hapless Mateo (Fernando Rey) all throughout the picture with their unspeakably abstract beauty. But… more
ScreeningNotes (5★) · 564 likes
Catching Up with Buñuel
So, from what I can tell, there are three things going on here, three central elements to this film. There's, you know, the central plot, a story about an old man and a much younger woman and their various romantic entanglements; there's the framing device, the fact that our protagonist, the much older man, is telling this story to a group of passengers he just met on a train car; and there's the violent environmental backdrop,… more
Andrew McMahon (2★) · 285 likes
"Mateo, you don't understand women."
...neither did 77 year old Luis Buñuel.