The Milky Way: Buñuel's Heresy Road Trip

Luis Buñuel spent sixty years being described as an anticlerical film-maker, which is accurate and almost entirely useless as a way of understanding him. The Milky Way, made in 1969 between Belle de Jour and Tristana, is the film that makes the uselessness obvious. Here is a picture in which two French vagrants walk the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela and, along the way, keep stumbling into dramatisations of the great doctrinal disputes of the Catholic Church — the nature of the Trinity, the mechanics of grace, whether the bread is the body or a symbol of the body. It is a comedy about heresy, written by a man who did not believe a word of any of it, and it takes the theology more seriously than most devotional cinema ever has.

That paradox is the film, and Buñuel knew it. He worked, as he had since 1963, with Jean-Claude Carrière, and the two of them did their research properly: the heresies in the picture are the real ones, argued in something close to their real terms, sourced from the dictionaries of ecclesiastical error that the Church itself compiled. Buñuel’s line about himself — that he was, thank God, still an atheist — is usually quoted as a joke. Watch The Milky Way and it reads as a description of a working method. He needed the faith to be intact in order to have something worth arguing with.

The premise, kept above the line

Pierre (Paul Frankeur) and Jean (Laurent Terzieff) are two French tramps heading south on foot towards Santiago de Compostela, the medieval pilgrimage destination in Galicia where the bones of the apostle James are said to lie. They are not devout. They are broke, and the road is a road, and pilgrims get fed. Frankeur plays Pierre as a sceptical, appetite-driven older man; Terzieff gives Jean a lean, aggrieved intensity, the look of someone permanently one insult from a fight.

Very early on the film establishes its rule without announcing it. The two men walk, and the road delivers encounters — a stranger in a cloak with a child and a dog, a restaurant, a hotel, a country house — and each encounter turns out to be a doctrinal position wearing clothes. The waiters argue transubstantiation on their break. A pair of gentlemen fight a duel over the theology of grace. Somewhere along the way the pilgrims step through what looks like an ordinary hedge and find themselves in the seventeenth century, then walk out again into 1969 without comment, because the road in this film runs through time as freely as it runs through Gascony.

Buñuel assembled an extraordinary cast to populate it: Michel Piccoli, Alain Cuny, Delphine Seyrig, Édith Scob, Pierre Clémenti, Bernard Verley, Julien Bertheau. Several of them appear for a single scene and never return. The picture is a relay of cameos, and knowing that in advance helps enormously, because the first-time viewer’s most common mistake is to wait for a plot that the film has no intention of supplying.

Why it works: the road as an editing device

The formal invention here is deceptively plain. Buñuel needs to move between the fourth century and the twentieth without the machinery of dream sequences or flashbacks, both of which would tell the audience how to file what they are seeing. His solution is the walk. Two men going in a straight line down a road is the most stable, most legible image in cinema; you cannot get lost watching it. So he makes the road the constant and lets everything else float. The pilgrims round a bend and there are duellists in period dress. They enter a building and it is a different century inside. The camera never flinches, the cutting never signals, and the men themselves barely react.

This does something no dissolve could. It puts the heresies in the present tense. A flashback would tell you that people once argued about whether Christ had one nature or two, and that we have moved on. Buñuel’s road tells you that the argument is still happening, just over the hill, and that if you walk far enough you will trip over it. The film’s real subject is the durability of fanaticism — the Jansenist and the Jesuit hacking at each other with swords are the same men, in the same posture, as any two people you know who are certain about something.

Christian Matras shot it in clean, sunlit, entirely unmysterious images, and that flatness is doing the heavy lifting. There is no glow around the miracles. A vision and a bus stop get identical treatment. This was Buñuel’s technique from Un Chien Andalou onwards, refined over forty years into something so unshowy that first-time viewers often miss how radical it is: he shoots the impossible exactly as he shoots the pavement, and the refusal to distinguish them is his entire argument.

Why it works: even-handed contempt

The most misread thing about the film is who it is attacking. Buñuel gives the heretics no easy heroism. The Manichaean, the Priscillianist, the Jansenist and the Jesuit are all filmed with the same cool amusement, and the heretic burning for his position is not treated as a martyr for free thought — he is treated as a man who is also certain, also unbudgeable, also willing to die over a proposition nobody can test. The Church supplies the executioners, and the dissidents supply the same appetite for absolutes in a different hat.

That even-handedness is what stops the film curdling into the smug anticlericalism it is usually filed under. Buñuel is not on the side of the sceptics, because his two sceptics are a pair of scrounging tramps who would sell any principle for a meal and who, by the end, are hardly improved. His target is the human conviction that a question with no possible evidence deserves a corpse. That target is not remotely period-specific, and it is why the picture has aged so much better than the anticlerical polemics of its own decade.

The comic register is essential to it. Buñuel plays every dispute absolutely straight, in the calm register of a costume drama, which means the laugh has to be manufactured by you, out of the gap between the gravity of the delivery and the absurdity of the stake. Nobody in the film ever winks. The waiters discussing the Eucharist over their coffee are entirely sincere. That sincerity, in 1969, in a restaurant, is the joke, and it is a much better one than mockery would have produced.

The collector’s note

The obvious companion is The Phantom of Liberty, made five years later, which takes the same relay structure and removes the pilgrims — the baton passes directly from character to character with no walkers to anchor it. The Milky Way is the gentler experiment, and the better place to start, because the road gives you something to hold. Together with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie they form the loose late trilogy in which Buñuel abandoned plot as a load-bearing structure and discovered he did not miss it.

The other essential cross-reference is Simon of the Desert, his forty-five-minute Mexican sketch about a pillar saint, which is the same joke in miniature and four years earlier: take a genuine article of faith, film it with total literalism, and let the literalism do the demolition. For the structural idea of a journey that keeps falling into other people’s stories, the great parallel outside Buñuel is The Saragossa Manuscript, Wojciech Has’s nested Polish epic from 1965, which shares both the picaresque road and the suspicion that stories are a form of trap. And for the acid-western descendant of the whole idea — Christ material played straight-faced by people who do not believe it — Greaser’s Palace is the American cousin nobody invites to dinner.

The honest case against

The Milky Way asks more homework of its audience than any other Buñuel film. If you cannot tell a Jansenist from a Molinist, roughly half the jokes will pass over you as strange men saying strange things in fields, and no amount of goodwill will retrieve them. The film does not explain, and it does not care. That is defensible, and it also means the picture has a genuinely restricted audience in a way that Belle de Jour does not.

It is also, structurally, a film that cannot build. A relay of self-contained episodes has no accumulation, so the ninety-eighth minute carries exactly the same charge as the twentieth. Buñuel would solve this two years later by making the absence of arrival the subject; here he is still discovering the form, and the middle stretch sags in a way the later films do not.

The verdict, above the line

This is Buñuel’s most intellectually ambitious film and his least seductive, and both facts come from the same source: he trusted the material to be interesting without help. It is a comedy of ideas in the strictest sense, in which the ideas are genuine, the comedy is dry to the point of dust, and the pleasure is the pleasure of watching a seventy-year-old master demolish a cathedral with a spirit level. Everything above this line is safe to read before watching. The final image is the whole argument in one gesture, so it goes below.

Spoilers below

The road ends, as it must, at Compostela, and Buñuel’s payoff is a piece of ecclesiastical history that he did not have to invent. The two pilgrims arrive to be told, more or less in passing, that the bones venerated in the cathedral may not be the apostle’s at all — that the tomb at Santiago may hold the remains of Priscillian, the fourth-century bishop executed as a heretic, whose followers were the very people the film has been dramatising. The greatest pilgrimage in western Christendom might have been, for a thousand years, a march to the grave of the man the Church burned. Buñuel drops this quietly, gives it no music, and moves on. It is the single funniest thing in his filmography.

Then comes the closing sequence, which is one of the great final images in European cinema and which I would not have anyone encounter secondhand. Jesus comes upon two blind men and heals them. They rise, exclaiming, and follow him. The party reaches a ditch across the path. The healed men step forward — and one of them, without hesitation, feels for the ditch with his stick before crossing.

That is the ending. No comment, no cut to a reaction, no music sting. The miracle happened and the habit survived it. Buñuel spends the whole film asking what people will kill and die over, and finishes by suggesting the answer is a thing that changes nothing at all, because faith is not really a proposition about the world — it is a way of walking, and it outlives its own evidence. The blind man can see. He uses the stick anyway. He will use it tomorrow.

Set against the ending of Belle de Jour, where the rug-pull dissolves everything into unresolvable ambiguity, this is the harder and cleaner move. There is no ambiguity in the ditch. The gesture is perfectly legible, and it is devastating precisely because you understood it instantly and Buñuel never had to say a word. My verdict: a difficult, unloved, genuinely major film, and the closest thing to a thesis statement that the most elusive director in cinema ever allowed himself. Watch it after The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when you have the taste for the structure, and keep a heresy reference to hand. The stick is still tapping.