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Glenn Kenny's "The Discophile"
(posted 8/21/2007)

Jesus contemplates shaving off his beard in The Milky Way. A special guest appearance by the director in The Milky Way.

Atheists owe an awful lot to God; if it weren't for Him, they wouldn't have anything to bitch about. Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel understood this in a way that the non-believers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of current anti–Big Guy bestsellers, don't. "I'm an atheist, thanks to God," was Buñuel's wry formulation of his own creed. Born and raised in the Spanish Catholic Church of the early 20th century — an ultra-hardcore entity even by Rome's standards — Buñuel's cinematic blasphemies and heresies were always informed by a deep knowledge of that which he mocked. When he scandalized the pious by having a group of raggedy, raucous beggars reenact the poses of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in Viridiana, he shrugged and pointed out that Leonardo's painting was a secular work and not a sacred relic — hence no blasphemy.

According to his longtime co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel had long wanted to make a film on the subject of religious heresy, and after the success of his 1967 Belle de Jour he got his chance. Inspired by the Russian-nesting-doll storytelling pyrotechnics of The Saragossa Manuscript as well as the picaresque tradition of Cervantes, and emboldened after seeing a screening of Godard's Les Chinoise — he figured if Godard could get away with that, anything was possible — Buñuel and Carrière created a unique, free-floating scenario involving two beggars (Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff) on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostela in Santiago, Spain. Their voyage through The Milky Way, now a wonderful disc from the Criterion Collection, bends both space and time, and they witness, or are placed in the proximity of, a slew of stories involving heretical theory and practice, both ancient and modern. A priest offers contradictory theories of the host to an innkeeper, and is soon removed by his keepers from the lunatic asylum; a maitre d' at an elegant restaurant discusses transubstantiation with his patrons while snapping at his staff; a group of schoolgirls recites various definitions of "anathema" for the entertainment of a picnicking crowd while one of the pilgrims dreams of the assassination of the Pope (played by Buñuel himself, as critic Jean Collett points out in one of the disc's excellent special features), his reverie broken by the sounds of actual gunshots; a Jesuit and a Jansenist try to settle their differences with an actual duel; and much, much more. Jesus pops up every now and then, contemplating shaving off his beard in one scene. His mom — the Virgin Mary to you — tells him the beard works.

All this is carried out with Buñuel's signature mastery, drollery, and love of enigma. Even at his angriest, as in his early films Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or, Buñuel's filmmaking had a bemused tone, and this movie's abundant comic touches are as dry as the gin martinis the great moviemaker was so publicly fond of. In one of the disc's extras, Carrière recalls that some people at the time wondered why he and Buñuel decided to make a film about heresy during the upheavals of May '68 and such; nothing, it seemed, could be less "relevant" at the time. But The Milky Way's examination of its subject was hugely pertinent, as the passions inflamed by dogmas and orthodoxies of the left at that time had come to resemble nothing so much as forms of religious hysteria; and one need not make any special pleading, alas, for its relevance today. That such a freewheeling, innovative, and essentially light-spirited film can at the same time be utterly, unsettlingly profound is an apt testament to Buñuel's genius.