La Voie lactée (1969)
Directed by Luis Buñuel

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...

Film Synopsis

Two tramps, Pierre and his younger friend Jean, undertake a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, to visit the sacred tomb of Saint James.  Along the way, their faith is put to the test by an extraordinary range of characters, including Jesus, an odd assortment of priests, the Marquis de Sade, the Devil and a prostitute who is all too eager to bear them a child.  Will they ever reach their destination...?