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
