Buñuel’s famed late seventies parable of the gender wars is a curious shaggy dog story of a film which appears to be about a wealthy older man trying to get his end away with a fetching, poor younger woman. In these banal terms, it might be thought that this is another dubious sex comedy, something out of the apolitical wing of the Aries studio, or primetime seventies ITV scheduling. However, from the outset, we get hints, in spite of the light-hearted tone, that something stranger is occurring. Firstly, the film is framed in flashback. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu boards a train at Seville and begins to narrate a tale that will last all the way to Madrid. The framing device lends the piece an unreliable air: the narrator is always going to present the story, which is triggered by his throwing a bucket of water at a young woman before the train leaves Seville, from his point of view. Secondly, radically, the woman in question, Conchita, is played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). This is a device worthy of a Milo Rau or Pirandello. It’s unsettling, awkward, it leaves the viewer struggling to work out why two in place of one. The story doesn’t flow with the same naturalness as an ordinary romantic tale. As viewers, it feels all wrong. Finally, in the background, things keep getting blown up. These are times of terror, with young idealists belonging to bizarre political sects blowing up cars and kidnapping people.
At the same time, the tone, framed by Rey’s laconic style, feels humorous. As he narrates how he is frustrated in his desires at every turn by Conchita, he gradually turns from being a rouê into a sap. The ‘natural’ course of events is constantly disrupted, subverting the Hollywood trope which still exists today of charming older man seducing beautiful young starlet. The old order is overthrown by the twin Conchitas, whose individuality is too much for him, eventually driving him to violence. To question the heteronormative dynamics so mercilessly in a mainstream movie was and still is an act of sly subversion by the director. Just as much as the young radicals who exist on the fringes of the film, he wants to blow up our concept of normality. The words ‘blow-up’ leads us towards Antonioni. What we can take form that generation of white male directors, which also includes he likes of Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Fellini, is that, even if they owed their place to a system that was skewed in their favour, they were prepared to play out their concerns, anxieties and doubts on the screen. This is not the film of a man comfortably settling into his pampered slippers. On the contrary, it’s a film that seeks to shake up that idea of comfort, to ridicule it, to blow it up.
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