I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #197 - The Milky Way (1969, dir. Luis Buñuel)

    In searching for a way to talk about an “in” to this very odd film, I was struck by a passage in a book I was reading at lunch on the very day I was coalescing ideas about the film. In Saul D. Alinsky’s 1971 book Rules for Radicals he writes this about the qualities of a good political organizer: “...for him life is a search for a pattern, for similarities in seeming differences, for differences in seeming similarities, for an order in the chaos about us, for a meaning to the life around him and its relationship to his own life - and the search never ends. He goes forth with the question as his mark, and suspects that there are no answers, only further questions.” Nothing could be more dead-on in nailing what I respond to in the works of my favorite director, Luis Buñuel. And in The Milky Way, the controversial director turns his absurd vision loose on an obscure topic – Catholic dogma and heresy – drawn directly from historical documents.

            But let’s back up a moment. Buñuel had something of a history with religion in film. His 1930 film L’Age d’Or caused a riot in Paris at its premiere with its scandalous ending in which the actions of a depraved count (based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade) are described in detail and then he is depicted as the popular image of Jesus (this got the film banned in France for over 30 years). His 1961 film Viridiana was made under the auspices of Franco’s Spain, but when word got out that Buñuel again had an anti-clerical bent to the film – this time a visual parody of Da Vinci’s famous The Last Supper – Spanish authorities tried to get the film recalled and destroyed, but Buñuel had already left Spain with a copy, and ended up winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes. And there were other films in and around these where Buñuel took a questioning or satirical stance toward religion – but more specifically this stance was aimed toward religious dogma, where in his words “each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready, if need be, to kill or to die for it.” It’s this sort of absurdity that The Milky Way examines.

            The film may seem out of step and politically disengaged compared with the intensely political climate of the times – the film started shooting in France before the events of May 1968 and its completion was delayed because of them – and it is. The film may be disengaged with the contemporary events, but the events were engaged with what Buñuel had talked about his entire career: the tendency of institutions – religious, governmental, political – to assert an authoritarian rule over the individual and this is precisely what the students and workers in France were rebelling against, even adopting the very slogans that the Surrealists used when Buñuel was a member of the Surrealist group in the 1920s – “It is forbidden to forbid” “Be realistic, ask the impossible” and the like.

So the film is un-contemporary perhaps, but the artistic style was very much in the air, inspired perhaps by The Saragrossa Manuscript (of which Buñuel was a fan) and the Spanish picarqesque, he and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière fashioned a loose narrative in which two pilgrims/tramps en route to Santiago de Compostela wander through history in disconnected sequences, entering into different time periods and places on their journey.

The film is ambiguous from the first scene, in which a passing stranger seems to speak in allegory to the pilgrims rather than having a conversation with them, then the scene cuts abruptly from one of them noting “It reminds me of something my mother used to say” to a scene with Jesus and Mary, him contemplating a nice shave and her telling him he looks better with a beard. Is the pilgrim the younger child depicted in the “flashback”? Is he meant to be Jesus? Is it a false memory or flashback? Who knows? Next it cuts right back to them with no explanation and they discover a child on the side of the road with stigmata. The child refuses to speak or answer them, but flags down a car when they are unable to, but they are promptly evicted for offending their driver when one utters “Christ Almighty” in thanks for the relative comfort of the car’s backseat. Here we’re just over ten minutes in to the film and it continues in this disjointed form for the remainder, offering up scenarios which our pilgrims wander into, witness from the sidelines, or even pass by, walking into debates that are intellectually/philosophically abstracted above their day to day concerns. They encounter such instances as a restaurant manager beset by theological questions by his staff, a class of young girls reciting heresies and proclaiming them "anathema," a Jesuit and a Jansenist dueling while arguing specific points of doctrine, a heretical priest being exhumed and burned, and so forth.

The film is full of the types of narrative digressions that populate this era of Buñuel’s films – dreams, reveries, illustrations of ideas that come up in conversations, etc. – and they create a unique narrative world full of the sort of mystery and ambiguity that Buñuel loved and created in his art from his earliest works. In his autobiography, he called the The Milky Way the first in a trilogy (along with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty) about "the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you’ve found it." Here he looks at the life-or-death importance of theological doctrines for his characters to show the complete arbitrariness of such things, noting that “The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all . . . The film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready, if need be, to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology.” A character in the film at one point notes “A religion without mystery is no religion at all.” and the same can be said of the art of Luis Buñuel’s films – the very ambiguity and irrationality is what makes them Buñuel films. No one has ever made anything like them before or since, and The Milky Way is one of his most eccentric, and his most rewarding.

-         Patrick Brown