Film Review
Throughout his career, the film director Luis Buñuel was noted
for his frequent attacks on the Catholic Church, attacks that brought
him into conflict with the Vatican and led him to be exiled to Mexico
on two occasions. In his first film,
Un
chien Andalou (1929), a man is shown dragging a piano on
which are stacked two priests and two dead donkeys.
L'Âge
d'or (1930), his next film, concludes with an even more
blasphemous image, a depiction of Christ as a disciple of the Marquis
de Sade. Although religion features in much of Buñuel's
work, often in a savagely humorous vein, it is central to only two of
his films:
Simón del desierto
(1965) and
La Voie lactée
(a.k.a.
The Milky Way)
(1969). In both of these films, Buñuel condemns a
religious orthodoxy that he considered flawed, dangerous and
divisive. The first targets religious leaders who exploit the
naive for their own dubious ends; the second is a pungent yet highly
amusing critique of the absurdity that underpins the Catholic
doctrine.
La Voie lactée derives
its title from the fact that the Milky Way was originally known as the
Way of St James, which guided pilgrims from North Europe to Santiago de
Compostela in Spain (Compostela comes from the Latin phrase Campus
Stellae, meaning 'field of stars'). A kind of surreal road movie
that occasionally looks as if it may have been put together by the
Monty Python team, the film presents a journey that is simultaneously
geographical, temporal and spiritual, combining contemporary settings
and characters with historical ones. Made in France in the
aftermath of the May 1968 demonstrations,
La Voie lactée is as
creepily evocative of its era as Jean-Luc Godard's
Week End
(1967) - both films anticipate some kind of violent political
revolution, which would manifest itself through the upsurge in
terrorism (such as that prosecuted by the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other
fringe political groups) in the early 1970s. Whereas Godard's
film attacks the failings of capitalism, Buñuel's attributes the
modern Godless society to the Church. By 1968 God is long dead,
immured in the sterile words of an irrelevant self-serving clerical
elite.
When it was first released in 1969,
La
Voie lactée was instantly branded anti-religious, an easy
epithet to attach to a film about heresy (it is worth noting that some
religious groups, notably the Jesuits, responded favourably to
it). With its overtly blasphemous imagery, it is easy to see why
the film may not have gone down too well with the devout. In one
scene, the Virgin Mary dissuades Jesus from shaving off his
beard. In another, a nun is nailed to a wooden cross by her
sisters after straying momentarily from the path of
righteousness. Then, in a moment of light relief, the Pope
(played by Buñuel himself) is shot dead by an anarchist firing
squad. The film ends in a similarly heretical vein with
Buñuel's best visual gag: two blind men, who have just had their
sight restored to them by Christ, are unable to cross a small ditch and
so are prevented from following their redeemer. The ditch may
well be the most significant thing in the film, a metaphor for the
narrow space that separates believers and non-believers, and which
Buñuel himself may have had difficulty in crossing.
Whilst
La Voie lactée
is certainly a forceful critique of Christianity, it is clear that it
is not intended to be an attack on faith per se. What it rails
against are the wishy-washy absurdities on which most (if not all)
organised religions are founded, the slavish adherence to which has
resulted in so much intolerance and bloodshed over the past two
millennia. It is out of these absurdities (euphemistically
labelled 'mysteries', as they defy human logic) that heresy springs,
heresy being not a rejection of the Divine but the acceptance of a
slightly different interpretation of a religious doctrine. This
is most effectively illustrated in the hilarious sequence in which a
Jansenist and Jesuit fight a duel to the death, with swords and words,
over a piffling disagreement over the nature of free will.
Buñuel's stance on faith and religion is famously
ambiguous. In an interview, he once thanked God that he was an
atheist, but he later insisted that he was neither a believer nor an
atheist (
au contraire...).
Buñuel's unwavering ambivalence towards Christianity can be felt
throughout
La Voie lactée.
Whilst the Church officials are invariably portrayed as insular,
cold-hearted pedants who revel in high-minded semantic wordplay, true
believers are depicted in a more sympathetic light, neither fools nor
charlatans. Buñuel may have been the Catholic Church's
fiercest critic, but he was not himself immune to the emotional pull of
certain aspects of the Christian faith. His principal objection to
organised religion was that it is fundamentally based on a rigid and
yet completely arbitrary interpretation of the religious texts.
The idea that you could be excommunicated or burnt at the stake for
supporting an interpretation that is
infinitesimally
different from the established doctrine was (to use a recurrent term in
the film) anathema to a man of Buñuel's intellectual
rigour.
La Voie lactée is a
statement not of the folly of Christianity, but of the failure of the
Christian religions to fulfil Christ's mission effectively. Faith
should be a matter for the heart, not the intellect. When he
finally got round to writing his autobiography at the end of his
career, Buñuel suggested that
La
Voie lactée was the first part of a trilogy which also
included
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
(1972) and
Le Fantôme de la liberté
(1974). In the latter two films, the director's main target is
not the Church but a not dissimilar congregation of rule-bound
hypocrites, the bourgeoisie. What connects these three late
films, and also sheds light on Buñuel's previous work, is a
resolute conviction that what matters most in life is the search for
truth - not a second-hand truth fed to us by those who have power over
us, but the truth that everyone must find for himself. This is,
after all, where surrealism came from: a desire to reject bogus
rationality and the conventions that restrict intellectual freedom, so
that we may find truth for ourselves. The gospel according to
Buñuel would have us believe that the last place you will find God
is in Church...
© James Travers 2013
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Next Luis Buñuel film:
Tristana (1970)