The thing about movies you love is, if you loved them, you've usually found a way to write about them on your blog at some point -- especially if you've had that blog for a long time. And since I've now passed the 14-year mark on The Audient, it's getting increasingly likely that choices for a rewatch series are movies that I saw, and wrote about, during that time.
At least with my first piece on The Exterminating Angel in 2016, it wasn't the sole focus of that piece. It was a piece that combined two movies about dinner parties that went disastrously wrong, the other being The Invitation. Still, I'll write about it now before I see what I wrote about it then.
Thursday night found me in a particularly interesting fugue state to watch this movie.
An hour before I started, I scarcely felt myself capable. To get my steps in, I'd taken an hour-long walk before dinner. That isn't the kind of thing that normally wipes me out, but it did this time, or at least the end result was that I was collectively wiped from a busy day at work and, I don't know, maybe the last three years of my life. My wife had also talked about being extremely tired, and we'd even COVID-tested my younger son when he came home from school because of some sniffles he was reporting. He was negative and neither of us really felt our "symptoms" were enough to warrant a test for ourselves. That's proven to be the right choice as I felt fine again yesterday.
Because I was going to be out all day yesterday -- I didn't return home until after 1:30 last night, in fact -- I made sure to do an extra dose of the normal nighttime chores on Thursday, putting away enough laundry for three families before it was finally time to sit down with the movie. And then I noted, well, maybe this was a partial explanation: I was starting to get a migraine. My migraines aren't usually painful, but they do involve the blotchy visuals that present a bit like retinal burns, and they can last for more than a half-hour.
So it was exactly in this condition that I did sit down with Luis Bunuel's film. I might have called an audible if not for the fact that I had already seen the movie and knew that its Spanish language dialogue was not going to be crucial to consume in toto, seeing how little it has to do with establishing a rigid plot.
The plot of this movie basically is: A bunch of fancy Spaniards attend a dinner party, and then they can't leave.
They get to what we would think of as an ungodly hour, but it might not be for the Spanish. In that country where we famously know that they often will have dinner at 11 p.m., a 3 a.m. evening is not particularly out of the ordinary. But at that time that they would usually close up shop and go home, instead they all start reclining on the fancy furniture and camping down for the night, the result of a sort of unspoken group decision. A few comment on the apparent absurdity of it, but not with any aim of resisting.
A week later, they're still there. Not only in that house, but in that particular room of that house.
And since all but one of the servants left before this even started, the only ones they're sharing the house with are a trio of lambs running up and down the stairs, and a bear cub that can be seen climbing the various columns and bannisters.
Yep, this is Bunuel at his finest alright.
We don't actually know it's a week -- one of them says it feels like a month. But before long the passage of time becomes difficult to discern, the guests begin hallucinating -- one even sees a disembodied hand creeping around the room -- and their collective sanity is hanging by a thread.
I'm quite certain there is a specific inspiration for this satire beyond just Bunuel's typical interest in warfare between the classes. In fact if I remember reading something about it at the time, there may have been coded references to a particular government or foreign conflict or something of that nature that 1962 audiences would have understood.
I could look that up, but I prefer not knowing. I like thinking that Bunuel's surreal ideas spring just from his imagination, not from something so banal as a political protest.
The visual splotches of my migraine did dissipate after maybe 15 minutes, but at certain junctures of the movie I had to give way to short naps. That's become increasingly common in my movie viewing, but in The Exterminating Angel it seemed particularly appropriate. I was watching a movie about people who couldn't understand how they'd found themselves draped over the furniture, sleeping the night after an ordinary social outing, rather than at home in their beds. And I woke from these one or two naps with a similar sort of disorientation, draped over my own couch, my TV having gone into a screen saver mode, showing images that were not from 1962, but rather, deserts and oceans and other random bits of beautiful photography from the 21st century. It was dreamlike for certain.
If I liked it a little less this time, it's only because The Exterminating Angel is such a wonderful oddity that subsequent viewings can't compare to your initial discovery of it.
Let's see what parts of Exterminating Angel I chose to focus on in 2016.
Well, it's only fair that I don't correct earlier mistakes made in this piece. The sharper of you will already know that I got the location of the movie wrong. Although Bunuel himself was Spanish, this movie is set in Mexico, which makes the original lateness of the hour I mentioned less of a cultural tradition. Oh well, egg on my face I guess.
Actually as it turns out, I didn't want to tell you even as much as I've told you in this piece (which is not nearly all of it) because I thought it was so lovely to discover the plot developments of The Exterminating Angel without them being spoiled in advance. There's only a single paragraph devoted to the movie, as the piece existed largely as a vehicle to discuss five other movies (also briefly) in which disastrous dinner parties occur. Those were Clue, Gosford Park, It's a Disaster, Rope, and Bunuel's own The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
That last is something I should also rewatch, though not for this series -- I'd like to at least vary up the classics I watch by subject matter, filmmaker and country of origin.
Let's see what April has in store.
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