Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Buñuel's last film, adapted from the Pierre Louys novel (about a woman who drives a man to distractions of frustrated desire) which also served as a basis for Sternberg's The Devil Is a Woman. Full of echoes from Buñuel's earlier work, it might almost be seen as a summation of his preoccupation with the connection between sex and violence, first annotated in L'Age d'or. His great coup here is to have the object of the hero's lusts played by two different actresses, with the alternation of svelte coolness and steamy voluptuousness lending teasing credibility to the way in which his ardour is cruelly cooled and heated by turns. These sexual games are brilliantly and tantalisingly funny, but the film is meanwhile secretly pursuing another obscure object of desire: the terrorism which surfaces in various forms (moral, social, cultural, economic, psychological, and even political), ranging from the bomb outrages that accompany the hero in his sexual odyssey down to the financial pressures he exerts in order to have his way. And just as L'Age d'or ended with an equation between the sexual and revolutionary acts, so does That Obscure Object of Desire, though in a deliberately coded, mystificatory form.Author: TM
Cast & crew
Director: Luis Buñuel
Producer: Serge Silberman
Cast: Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet, Angela Molina, Julien Bertheau, André Weber, Piéral, Milena Vukotic full cast
Duration: 103 mins
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now