L’Âge d’or (1930)

L’Âge d’or is a French fantasy film first released in 1930, directed by Luis Buñuel.  The film stars Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst and Josep Llorens Artigas.  It has also been released under the title: Age of Gold.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


A party of dignitaries arrive on the shore of an island to pay homage to some dead heroes but are outraged to see a couple making love on the beach.  The man is dragged away by police, but he manages to persuade them to release him for services he has rendered to the state.  The man and the women subsequently meet up at a party, but their attempts to get together are constantly frustrated by their family, guests and other distractions...

After their first collaboration on Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali attempted to make an equally daring film in which surrealism and anti-bourgeois sentiment are combined  to shocking effect.  However, appalled by Buñuel’s anti-religious ideas, Dali abandoned the project at an early stage and Buñuel went on to make his first solo film.

With some visually stunning moments and deeply disturbing imagery, combining the profane with the blatantly erotic, the film shows, in its rawest form, many of the characteristics of Buñuel’s subsequent great films.  The all-out attack on bourgeois society would become a major theme in the great director’s cinema, but here the passion is totally untempered, and is as disturbing as it is comic.

Perhaps what is most shocking about this film is the way in which Buñuel splices surreal elements into what appears, on the surface, to be a conventional film, following the established conventions of silent cinema.  For instance, a scene with a father playing happily with his son ends with him taking out a rifle and shooting the young boy dead.  A short while later a Catholic priest and a stuffed giraffe are thrown out of an upstairs window.  Any attempt to make any sense of all this is clearly doomed to failure, or at least to offer a one-way ticket to the nearest lunatic asylum.

The film was financed to the tune of a million francs by the nobleman Vicomte de Noailles, who commissioned a film every year for his wife’s birthday.  He was one of the few people to appreciate the film at the time.  When it was first released, there was a storm of protest.  A riot involving two right-wing extremist groups broke out at the Paris premier in 1930, with ink bottles being hurled at the screen.   Even when it was subsequently banned (for nearly 50 years), it continued to raise passions in the press.

© James Travers 2001

See also:
The life of Luis Buñuel
Un chien Andalou
Viridiana
El Angel exterminador
Belle du jour
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
French fantasy films




Write a review for this film...


What do you think of this film?

More French Fantasy
Recent DVD releases