Le fantôme de la liberté

Plot synopsis:
Toledo, 1808, a Spanish city occupied by French Napoleonic troops. A firing squad executes a small group of Spanish rebels who cry out Down with liberty! or Long live chains! The troops are encamped in a Catholic church which they desecrate by drinking, singing, and eating the communion wafers. The captain caresses a statue of a medieval woman and is knocked unconscious by her husband (a knights funerary statue). In revenge, the captain exhumes the body of the wife to find her face has not decomposed; there is a suggestion of intended necrophilia.Cut to the present day where a nanny is reading the voice-over from a book whilst seated on a park bench. The children in her care are given some pictures by a strange man in the park; there are implications of child abduction or pedophilia. Cut to a close-up of a spider and the interior of a bourgeois apartment where a man is fed up with symmetry as he rearranges his mantelpiece. The children arrive home and show the pictures to their parents who are shocked that the girls have such images. The parents are disgusted and yet erotically stimulated by the images which we assume to be pornographic when we see the images, they are revealed as picture postcards of architecture (there is a satirical nod towards Freudian symbolism in the images of tunnels and columns). The parents then let the children keep the pictures and dismiss the nanny. At bedtime, the husband cant sleep as he is woken in the night by a cockerel, a postman and an emu wandering through his bedroom.In the next scene, the husband visits his doctor, who dismisses these nighttime experiences as apparitions despite the fact that the husband has physical evidence in the form of a letter from the nocturnal postman. The evidence is never considered as the doctors nurse interrupts the conversation to tell her employer that she must visit her sick father. The nurse drives through a rainy night, meeting a military tank on the road that is apparently hunting foxes. The soldiers tell her that the road ahead is blocked; the nurse drives to an isolated hotel.A storm breaks as the nurse checks in at the small rural hotel. Some Carmelite monks are also staying at the hotel. She takes supper in her room while a flamenco dancer and guitarist perform in an adjacent room. The monks interrupt her as she is dressing for bed. They offer to use a holy effigy and prayer to assist her sick father, they begin to pray. Time has passed and the monks are playing a game of poker with the nurse and the hotel manager, gambling with holy relics, smoking and drinking alcohol.That same night, some new guests arrive at the hotel; a young man and his aunt. The young nephew has brought his aunt to the hotel for an incestuous affair yet another sexual taboo is addressed. They retire to their room, the elderly aunt confesses that she is a virgin, when the nephew pulls back the sheets to look at her naked body; she has the body of a young woman. The nephew is refused by his aunt and leaves his room to join another couple (a hatter and his female assistant) for a drink. The nurse and the four monks are also invited into the hatters room. While the guests are socialising, the hatters assistant dons a dominatrix outfit with a whip. The hatter, who is wearing bottomless trousers, proceeds to be masochistically flagellated by his assistant in front of the other guests who are shocked and leave. The nephew returns to his aunt, who is now willing to make love with him.The next morning, the nurse leaves for the town of Argenton, giving a lift to another resident who is breakfasting in the bar. This resident is a professor at the police academy. He is dropped off at work where he gives a lecture to a class of delinquent policemen on the subject of the relativism of laws, customs and taboos. The lecture is constantly interrupted until only two officers are left in the class. The professor continues, using a dinner party at his friends house to illustrate a point he is making. We then cut to the dinner party which is being held in a modern bourgeois apartment.The guests are seated around the table on flushing toilets. They politely discuss various issues around the topic of defecation whilst publicly using the toilets that they are sitting on. When a guest is hungry, he excuses himself and retires to a private cubicle to eat food.We cut back to the police lecture. The two policeman go on duty where they stop a speeding motorist (Mr. Legendre) who is rushing to see his doctor. Mr. Legendre is eventually told by his doctor that he has cancer and offered a cigarette, he slaps his doctor and returns home. Once home, he tells his wife that nothing is wrong with him. They receive a phone call informing them that their daughter has disappeared from school.We now cut to the school where the teachers insist that the little girl has vanished despite the fact that she is physically present. Her disappearance is reported to the police, the girl is present but none of the adults admit to her presence. In this absurdist scene, she is there the adults are able to see and speak to her, yet they act as if she is missing.We follow one of the policemen, who is having his shoes shined. We then follow the man who is sitting next to him to the top of a tower block. This man is a sniper who randomly kills people in the streets below. He is arrested, found guilty and sentenced to death but leaves the courtroom to be treated as a celebrity.Mr. Legendre is called to see the Prefect of Police who returns the missing daughter. The prefect is about to read a letter explaining how the girl was found but is interrupted and leaves to visit a bar. In the bar he meets a woman who looks like his dead sister (we see a flashback in which he remembers his sister playing the piano, naked). He then receives a phone call from his dead sister, asking him to meet her at the mausoleum. When he visits the cemetery at night, he finds a telephone in the crypt by his sisters coffin; her hair is hanging out of the coffin. He is suddenly arrested for desecration by officers who refuse to believe that he is the Prefect of Police.The prefect is taken to his office, where a different man takes his place. The two men treat each other cordially and discuss crowd control as if they are acquainted. We see the animals in the zoo, the two police chiefs arrive and direct police control of an unseen riot. The film ends with a close-up shot of an ostrichs head.

Tags: absurd, psychedelic, satire, comedy, murder

Review:
He probably thought he could get away with that because Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) won an Academy Award for best foreign picture and Buñuel figured that everybody would be going to see this film, no matter how off the wall it was.In Voie Lactee is a heated conversation between a catholic and a Jesuit about personal freedom that comes to a mysterious compromise when the Jesuit exclaims: 'Ma liberte est un fantom!' That is worked out here in Fantome de la liberte for a wider audience, in that we don't have to know much about the differences between catholics and Jesuits to be able to understand what's going on.
The master of surrealistic cinema, Luis Buñuel, changed his approach to the bourgeoisie after "Tristana", and his last three films are all comic and prevail through a mixture of pure surrealism, extreme irony and the one consistent theme of Buñuel's auteurship- hatred of the ruling classes.
The film contains absurd, surreal incidents, like priests playing cards while smoking and drinking, parents reacting to postcards of famous buildings given their daughter by a stranger as they were obscene and a writer killing tens of people from his sniping-position at the roof of a building.
Through many episodes with some linking points since 1808 in Toledo (Spain) to the present days in France, Bunuel presents a delicious surrealistic satire to the moral and costumes of the hypocrite society, to the family values and to the church.
Luis Bunuel's "Le Phantôme de la liberté" is a movie whose episodes are only loosely connected, because the watcher is a part of the society whose liberty and freedom is a phantom.
Bunuel's movie was released in 1974, thus just at the time when Pier Paolo Pasolini started to film his last work "Salo", in which (amongst many other marvelous events) there is the famous or infamous scene where people are forced to eat faeces.
But faeces play an important role in Bunuel's "Phantom of Liberty" (so the English title of this movie), too: The teacher explains his friends how many kilograms of faeces a human produces daily, and since there are so and so many billions of people on this world, this makes so and so many tons of faeces per year.
Luis Bunuel's final film from an original screenplay (by him and collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere), The Phantom of Liberty, befuddled me so much more than the other Bunuel films I've seen that I had to turn it off after twenty minutes, thinking I'd get back to it at some point.
The strange thing is about this film, and I've come to realize it more after seeing Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie again recently (my favorite feature length film of his), is that there is such a line that is walked, like a tightrope walker holding an elephant in one hand and a thumbnail in the other, that one wonders whether this should be taken totally seriously or just with the general hysteria and (crucially) absurdism that laces much of Bunuel's work in his post Mexico period.
It wouldn't; there's a sense of pacing that makes the film seem rather serious, but (as it says on the back of the original video box) it owes as much to Monty Python as it does to the old-school 20's surrealism that got Bunuel up off his feet and into the cinema scene.
Although Bunuel was to make one more film,"cet obscur objet du désir" ,"phantom of liberty" would remain his testament,his last sigh ,to mention the title of his memoirs.The key to the movie is the segment dealing with the naughty gendarmes,the sociology teacher and Margaret Mead's books.Law must not be taken for granted,it depends on where and when you live.Something which would seem unbearable to us is nothing but natural to other human beings.The whole movie walks this fine line,being built around this very concept.It is Bunuel's most accessible movie and it's completely mad,which is fine with me.Its construction is not unlike Max Ophuls's "la ronde" (1950) as a new character provides the connection between the segments.It's not really free-form ,in the sense of the nouvelle vague ,nothing Godardesque here and anyway,Bunuel possessed something Jean-Luc will never have:humor.And the screenplay displays care and respect for the audience.One should point out Jean-Claude Carrière's importance in Bunuel's last works in France.In "discreet charm of the bourgeoisie" ,humor which was latent in the former works (the dogs in "Viridiana" ;the pineapple in "Nazarin" ) came to the fore."Phantom" is probably not as strong as the previous work:it's sometimes uneven and some segments (the old aunt and her nephew)drag on.But most of the times,it's a delight.Bunuel's usual targets ,the Church and the Army are both given a rough ride .But social conventions ,"normality" are too.A bevy of great actors take us to a magical mystery tour (Bunuel's regret was that too many movies lack mystery) Here he focused on the secret of the passage of the night hours ,wherever the action takes place ,in Brialy's and Vitti's bedroom or the inn where the guests are weird to say the least (the scenes in the inn recall those of "la voie lactée,1969).And the ostrich in the couple's room ,we find it back at the zoo,for the finale,when repression rises.When we bury our head in the sand ,French people call it "ostrish politics"!
Bunuel was a great man.Everything he did is crying to be watched.When the movie was released,probably upset by the huge commercial success ,some critics called it "Bunuel' s holiday homework".Time proved them wrong.In 2005,"phantom" is solid as a rock..
Bunuel is trying to send us a message through his film with a surrealistic touch that the idea of freedom that we think we have does not really exist.
Phantom of Liberty for the most part is quite a normal film with a structured narrative and some quite well defined characters What makes it brilliant is the fact that one minute, its just a normal film and then a scene where a family sit at a table on toilet seats is thrown at us.
I feel the same way about 'The Phantom Of Liberty' as I do about Bunuel's previous movie 'The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie'.
I think that 'The Phantom Of Liberty'  might be the easiest way for a novice to get into Bunuel, but it's not his best movie by a long shot.
I don't know how often I could watch films like "The Phantom of Liberty" before it got old and uninteresting, but I'm glad that there was someone out there to accomplish what Bunuel did.
"I'm sick of Symmetry" a character says in this film, and here we have one of the last works of Luis Bunuel's surrealistic fantasies that brings a story after another with a never ending that mocks the ignorance in which societies live in; It's just amazing how Bunuel exposures the conventionalism to which we are so accustomed and makes of any place a more decadent and irrational angle of the world.
Sometimes criminals that commit heinous crimes somehow are set free and kill again.Overall, Bunuel does a incredible job of representing society's morals and cultural taboos through the actions of fictitious characters that serve as humorous symbols of our life..
One of Luis Bunuel's most free-form and purely Surrealist films, consisting of a series of only vaguely related episodes - most famously, the dinner party scene where people sit on lavatories round a dinner table on, occasionally retiring to a little room to eat.Luis Bunuel said, "Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later.
If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme." I know I am in the minority, but I do not quite see the appeal of Bunuel's later films.
Out of all the directors who've played around with Surrealism, Bunuel is the best at making his movies feel like an actual dream with enough reality to keep you guessing of what will happen next.If you are looking for intelligent entertainment that challenges Hollywood's typical storyline you won't be let down.
It should be viewed with an open mind, as every preconceived notion that you have ever envisioned will be transformed or at least tested.Phantom of Liberty is extremely entertaining and forces you to question your own concept of reality and freedom.
Luis Buñuel has precisely constructed a work that preys on our society's monotony, while at the same time pointing out the insanity that lies within all of us.What moved me the most was how, after basically watching movies since I was born, I realized just how programmed I was to the standard structure of film narrative that each transition by Buñuel struck even more drastically than the last.Some would say that you should watch the movie being open for anything; I disagree.
So, for that reason not only is "The Phantom of Liberty", but all Luis Buñuel movies great to watch..
It is a series of comical scenes, much like Bunuel's previous work "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", rather than being a film with any real plot.
Also, Hasosch ("The Dissolution of Form and Function", hasosch from United States, 19 July 2007) takes a stab at interpreting it.***"Phantom Liberty (1974, Luis Buñuel)," a surreal comment on the ruling class, is a curious, occasionally very disturbing work arranged with quality.
This isn't a serious movie, exactly, but it addresses serious issues: taboos about sex and proper social behavior; individual freedom and the needs of the community; corruption and authority.It is tempting to describe some of my favorite scenes, but The Phantom of Liberty is best seen without expectations.
Bunuel, with each scene and character, is challenging the form of story in film itself.
There is no need to connect to the characters to figure out the intentions/meaning or to be spurred to dig deeper about the implications of the random stories – Bunuel makes more of a commentary on society in a 15 minute scene with five random characters thrown together in a seemingly absurd situation than some directors do in their entire careers over multiple films.
While there are core thematic ideas woven throughout the film regarding political and social satire, on first viewing it is hard not to get lost in the dreamy surreality of real-life that Buñuel so eloquently portrays in his 1974 masterpiece..
I feel that Luis Buñuel was trying to question social norms and make the point that what is the difference really between eating and releasing your bowels when they are both just a process of your body getting energy through food.
In the video introduction to The Phantom of Liberty, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière noted that he and Director Luis Buñuel set out with the premise of presenting the audience with a series of stories (tableaux) and then, just as each story gets interesting, ending the story, and moving on to another story.
Such a premise for a movie could be a disaster but under the masterful direction and writing of Buñuel and Carrière, the end result is brilliant.More than just turning traditional story telling on its head and making us examine our expectations of storytelling, the filmmaker turns social mores, customs and taboos on their head and make us examine our expectations of such societal constructs.The tableaux flows easily from one to another and never appear disjointed, leaving us free to become immersed in Bunuel's whimsical, farcical, touching, and provocative topsy-turvy world..
The film was a little weird for me because i have never seen film with thous kind of "personalities" for me i give the film a nine because it makes people think out of the box because in the film when the young men is trying to sleep with the older women in the hotel or when the priests are smoking and playing poker people don't like to speak up but in reality does things do happens people don't like to see the truth and in this film they show how life is and the directer choose the best cast because they have a way of making the movie come to life their acting is so real that it transforms the view like if you are there like if that's your life not just like you are watching a film.
It made me question how and why a certain character was acting this way and why Luis Buñuel chose this style to film it.
The Phantom of Liberty doesn't follow a story or a character but rather follows a series of episodes involving characters in routine situations that might seem abnormal to the average person.Luis Bunuel takes storytelling in cinema and literally breaks down the walls of what we as a society deem as abnormal and make it seem normal or vice versa.
Each specific episode has a specific message that Bunuel is trying to convey and for the most part it definitely reaches the audience but at the same time it can also be mentally exhausting.The best way to describe way Phantom of Liberty is that it literally breaks down our idea of common sense and it makes the audience rebuild our idea of what is normal or why we think of certain things as normal or abnormal.Phantom of Liberty is an experience unlike any other cinema that I personally have ever experienced.
Bunuel's genius behind "The Phantom of Liberty" is how he composes multiple episodes of people's lives and strings them together throughout the course of the film.
What makes this movie stand out is the continual moments of surrealism, where Bunuel proves to the viewer how something that surely makes us gasp, is simply a norm to the people in the film.
Even though the film is full of irrational logic, everything he presents to the audience are experiences that could happen in anyone's life; this idea defined as surrealism parallels what life could be like if you lived in a dream world for example, where there are infinite possibilities for anything to happen.
A droll occurs when some military men in tank stop cars on the road and ask for foxes; but soon symbolically the vicious fox appears in stuffed form in the hotel room where the incestuous affair between aunt-nephew takes place.The most remarkable weird scene of the movie is that people attend a potty (!) party by sitting on commodes around a dining table and taking their dinner separately in a little room like toilet!!!
The series of absurd surrealist vignettes are framed in such a way that teases and entices the viewer where conventionally disturbing scenarios are balanced by a sense of humor and an aesthetic that creates a world where it feels to "safe" to be "unsafe." Even when one reaches a point where the unexpected becomes expected the specificity of the director's choices allows the audience the space and the freedom to make connections (or not) as one pleases similar to reacting to a dream while dreaming.
There's no other way to watch this movie than to be COMPLETELY open minded and willing to let go of what you think, and what society has taught you, to be rational.
Phantom of Liberty reminds us to not simply accept everything society tells us is normal.Regardless, this movie has been on my minded ever since I've watched it..
I really enjoyed how this film frees the audience from our rational ways of thinking and instead invites us into the dream-like state.
In this movie we challenge rituals with alternate "possible" scenarios (for example, a scene described by the professor of a police academy to his class where house guests meet to defecate, rather than eat around a table), confront blatant hypocrisy (monks drinking, smoking and gambling with religious tokens after admonishing a flamenco dancer for being too frivolous) and consider a reality in which we have too much freedom (a sniper targeting random people in the streets).
Buñuel gives us an incredibly creative and thought-provoking journey into surrealism with this movie of a "day in the life" of ordinary people in unusual circumstances.
The Phantom of Liberty is a film that truly makes you think, question, and explore.
I found the surrealist aspect of this film quite comedic; on the other hand I found Bunuel's critique on human society very well executed and it left me questioning why we as a society do the things we do, the way we do.
Compared to "The Phantom of liberty," "Babel" is a movie that makes more sense to me.In this movie, the parts that I like would be the humorous manner to show audience the ideas of Luis.
The Phantom of Liberty is a movie that is structured in tabló, managing to go from one story to another through a transition where the characters are linked to each other.The surrealism throughout the whole movie is very comedic and mocking though it perfectly conveys the message –of how people almost always tend to pass judgment in our societies and everyday life.
-. "Phantom of Liberty", directed by Luis Bunuel, deals with social values and the frustration these bring along in many ways.
Luis Bunuel's film, "Phantom of Liberty," I felt was to be one of the most humorous movies on society of all time.
Phantom of Liberty, a great film that raises many questions about society and shows how hypocrite the world is as we say one thing and do another.
Not leaving out that this film was quite humorous and it played with paradoxes in certain scenes, it touched on a lot of serious points involved in the real world at the time, and even today.
Luis Bunuel gives us a series of connected yet individual little movies in one that asks questions like "why not?" or "says who?".
Bunuel was always interested in the surreal and dreams, "Phantom of Liberty" especially.