The Phantom of Liberty

(1974)

★ 7.5 IMDb · 338 votes

Genres: Comedy

Year: 1974

Runtime: 104 мин

Country: France

Director: Luis Buñuel

Cast: Жан-Клод Бриали, Adriana Asti, Милена Вукотич, Monica Vitti, Жан Рошфор, Мишель Пикколи, Адольфо Чели, Клод Пьеплю, Paul Frankeur, Pierre Maguelon

Plot

This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

As unusual, eccentric, and bizarre vignettes of mundane and seemingly innocuous conventions of our social and private lives success one another, somehow, Napoléon Bonaparte's troops, earthly monks, dangerous snipers, and the peculiar disappearance of a beloved one metamorphose into banal instances of our daily existence. With this in mind, under those surreal circumstances, the abnormal becomes normal, the obvious transforms into something unclear or even invisible, and the extraordinary transfigures into ordinary. But, are things always black and white? How real is the haunting spectre of liberty?