Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974)

Le Fantôme de la liberté is a French film comedy-drama first released in 1974, directed by Luis Buñuel.  The film stars Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean-Claude Brialy, Adolfo Celi and Paul Frankeur.  It has also been released under the title: The Phantom of Liberty.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


In the Spanish city of Toledo, rebels refusing to be freed by Napoleonic troops declare "Down with freedom!" as they are shot dead by a firing squad.  When a captain is struck by a statue of King Ferdinand II, he takes his revenge by opening the tomb of Queen Isabella I, to reveal a perfectly preserved body.  Fast forward to a park in modern day France where a strange man offers some dubious postcards to a young girl.  When the girl’s middle-class parents see the postcards (which are all of famous landmarks) they are appalled and dismiss their maid.   At a rural inn, some Carmelite monks take a break from their religious duties by playing card games, using their medallions as poker chips.  In an adjacent room, a young man is doing his utmost to seduce the frigid aunt who has ignited his passions.  The monks and this young Casanova are then invited into another room to watch a display of sadomasochism.   A sniper is at large in Paris.  Arrested after killing several pedestrians, he is tried, sentenced to death, and then set free.  A married coupled are horrified when they learn that their little girl has gone missing.  They immediately go to the school to collect their daughter and take her to the police station to report her disappearance.  A police commissioner is chatting up an attractive young woman in a bar when he receives a telephone call from his dead sister.  When he attempts to open his sister’s coffin, he is arrested and taken to see the police commissioner.  The two commissioners are then called to the zoo to oversee a police operation to control a public demonstration.  What the animals make of all this we can only guess...

Le Fantôme de la liberté represents Luis Buñuel’s most virulent attack on the conventions of cinema and bourgeois society and sees the director making a joyous return to the unbridled surrealist expressionism of his earliest films, Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (1930).  It was the immense success of Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) that led producer Serge Silberman to grant Buñuel a complete free rein on his next film.  The idea of freedom had always fascinated Buñuel and his entire oeuvre can be seen as a continual striving to achieve freedom within the fairly uncompromising constraints of filmmaking.  In Le Fantôme de la liberté, Buñuel explores the illusionary nature of freedom, perhaps more successfully than any other director, and shows how the arbitrary frameworks devised by man in an attempt to impose order on a chaotic world will inevitably frustrate his innate desire for freedom.  The random nature of things and our futile attempts to tame this randomness are what ultimately negate our free will, making us slaves to a set of social norms that are contrary to our true nature.  We want to be free but we fear anarchy, so we make ourselves slaves to a set of rules and values that make us safe but prevent us from being free.

Whilst Le Fantôme de la liberté may initially appear to be completely unstructured, a series of vignettes that only just manage to dovetail into one another via a chance occurrence, it is actually the most carefully structured of all Buñuel’s films.  When they began work on the screenplay, Buñuel and his fellow screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière actually found the lack of constraints to be more of a challenge than a liberating force.  The story goes that the two men developed ideas for the film by ringing each other up early in the morning to exchange the dreams they had experienced that night.  Buñuel included incidents from his own life, referring not only to themes he had previously covered in his films (notably humorous assaults on the Church, the police and the bourgeoisie) but also private matters, such as his being recently diagnosed with cancer.  The film’s title derives from a line in the director’s earlier film La Voie lactée (1969) - "I experience in every event that my thoughts and my will are not in my power, and that my liberty is only a phantom."  It is also a reference to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto, which begins with the phrase: "A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism."   The eerie final sequence of the film, in which we see animals startled by a violent altercation between police and demonstrators (which we hear but do not see) is reminiscent of the ending of L’Alliance (1971), a film which Jean-Claude Carrière had recently scripted and starred in.  From the point of view of an ostrich, we must appear to be a very strange species indeed - we don’t just put animals in cages, we also destroy our own freedom, with plastic bullets and tear gas.

Le Fantôme de la liberté is not only the most anarchic of Buñuel’s films, it is also his funniest and includes some of his most memorable sight gags.  In contrast to Un chien andalou, which was intended to be completely unfathomable, the surrealism of this film appears to have its own bizarre logic.  Instead of juxtaposing completely unrelated ideas (the conventional approach to surrealist art), Buñuel takes familiar situations and gives them a slight, carefully modulated twist.  Thus, a dinner party involves guests turning up to defecate around a table (rather than eat) as they engage in polite conversation.  When the urge takes them, the guests may sneak away to a little room to have a bite to eat in guilty solitude.  Another sequence involves a middle-class couple reporting the disappearance of their daughter to the police; they are accompanied by their little girl but they seem to be incapable of getting past the idée fixe that their daughter has gone missing.   A mass murderer is set free and hailed as a hero immediately after he has been given the death sentence.

What Buñuel shows us is a reality that hasn’t so much been inverted as delicately fractured, and it is the slightness of this distortion of everyday experience which brings home the plasticity and arbitrariness of our own seemingly ordered reality.  After all, just why should eating in public be considered socially acceptable whilst defecating is something that must take place in private?  Why should we not be more offended by postcards of French tourist attractions than lewd pictures of the human body?  Why are we shocked by the sight of Carmelite monks smoking and gambling away their religious tokens in a game of cards?  There is nothing inherently shocking or unnatural in what the film shows us, but we are constantly taken by surprise because what we see conflicts with the pattern of behaviour that we consider normal.  Our view of normality is determined not by our own reasoning but by the standards that society expects us to adhere to.  Had a different set of choices been made, a different set of social norms might have resulted, and everything that Le Fantôme de la liberté shows us might well appear completely banal.  Freedom exists only when we, as individuals, can make a choice; often as not, the choice has already been made for us.  Just as the Spanish rebels reject the freedom offered by Napoleon in the film’s opening sequence, we should be very wary of the freedom that life appears to present us with.  When a stranger comes up to you and promises freedom, he is almost certainly holding a set of chains behind his back.

© James Travers 2011

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