Exterminating Angel
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DVD: Region Code 0Movie Reviews of Exterminating Angel
Movie Review: And for desert - the terror of history
Summary: 5 Stars
Luis Bunuel is a filmmaker whose work, although it is of such magnitude and weight that I among many believe it will never go out of style as long as the media exists, has, since his death, somewhat languished. He had the misfortune of dying at the wrong time. Fascism was on the rise worldwide. Reagan had ascended to the American presidency. `Liberal' had become a `dirty' word. The complexion of the general film going public had changed and drifted considerably to the mindless right. Art houses no longer catered to themes of the radical left - and what, with rock-stars voting Republican, material girls and retro in, even the underground seemed drifting, however mindfully, somewhat right. Good ol' in your face Marxism - staple of Bunuel's themes - was out of fashion.
All that now has changed. The `cat-house' atmosphere of the 80's and 90's has vanished in the realization of the many who never got a taste, or got but a taste, of the promised trickle, or that elusive dot.com success, that we are living in a corporate/fascist police state ruled by a brutal, insensitive, fattened bourgeois elite and fueled by insane theocratic/fundamentalist paranoia and blind greed. The root of which is brilliantly articulated and displayed in Bunuel's many diverse and visionary works. That point tells: for me, ironically, what makes these films as great as they are, is that in his literal pounding out of these themes, utilizing the graphic capacity of film as few have ever have, Bunuel enters into a mystical realm, in which he speaks of things so basic to the human predicament or situation, that beyond the humor or the horror, we feel them, and must admit our participation in them.
I don't know which is Bunuel's greatest - maybe Viridiana - maybe The Exterminating Angel. The films he made with Sylvia Pinal are extraordinary, but those he made with Deneuve and Moreau aren't too shoddy either. And let us not forget the masterworks of his twilight years, The Obscure Object of Desire and The Phantom of Liberty. Or earlier works, like Simon of the Desert . . . That plaudit I cannot give to one, as a number of the reviewers here do. But I cannot object - The Exterminating Angel is one of the masterpieces of cinema, drama, what have you - and although imitated and emulated, never quite equaled.
I hope that the generation coming of age now, in Bush's America and around the world, especially in the Mid-East don't forget to take in a Bunuel flick or two, and one can do no better than his one horror film, The Exterminating Angel. Contrasted with today's high- budget blood and gore horror extravaganzas, there are no special effects, the pace, characteristically, is crawlingly slow, deliberate (which may account for the negative reactions on this page). Fear not, you will not forget it. The problem analyzed here is similar to but runs much deeper than what's being discussed in a comparable classic, Todd Browning's `Freaks'. What's being discussed is the force inherent in convention which stands as the basis of community. Are we willingly members of a community, or are we impelled by certain enforced necessity? The phony affectations which we assume as permanent masks - the way we habitually, and then traditionally, hide our true feelings and intentions from the public gaze - these Bunuel sees neuroses symptomatic of an essential dishonesty which pervades our social relations. The guests want to leave this party (which is at the least a bore, and at the worst, uncomfortable) but as they try to exit, at first gracefully, and then desperately, they are met at the door by a mysterious force field which will not let them leave. They must return and face their destinies. The rest is, beyond all the lies, history, in all its real terror.