The Exterminating Angel

In the best surrealist tradition, Buñuel claimed that his brilliant, disconcertingly funny joke - after an upper class dinner party, the guests find some mysterious compulsion making it impossible for them to leave the premises - has no rational explanation. True enough, but there are meanings aplenty in his powerful central image of decay as the vast, magnificently appointed bourgeois salon is gradually reduced to a sordid rubbish-heap where the once elegant guests squat and gnaw at bones. Significantly, the whole thing takes place under the sign of the church, but what still delights about the film is the way it refuses to be pigeonholed. Devastatingly funny, illuminated by unexpected shafts of generosity and tenderness, it remains one of Bunuel's very best.