The Phantom of Liberty: Buñuel's Chain of Non Sequiturs

Most film-makers spend their careers learning how to make one thing lead to another. Luis Buñuel, at seventy-four, spent The Phantom of Liberty proving he could do without it entirely. The 1974 film has no protagonist, no plot, and no through-line beyond a baton that passes from one set of characters to the next roughly every ten minutes and is never handed back. A story starts, gathers interest, and then the camera notices someone at the edge of the frame and simply leaves with them. The abandoned characters are gone for good. You will never learn what happened to them, and by the end you will have stopped expecting to.

Described that way it sounds like an endurance test. It is one of the most purely enjoyable films Buñuel ever made — funnier, faster and more generous than the reputation suggests — because he had by this point spent forty-five years perfecting the deadpan and knew exactly how much absurdity a straight face can carry. Working again with Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-wrote every one of his French films from 1964 onwards, and producer Serge Silberman, he made the picture immediately after The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie had won him an Academy Award, which is to say he made it from a position of total artistic impunity and used every inch of it.

The premise, kept above the line

There is no premise, which is the premise. The film opens in Toledo in 1808, during the Napoleonic occupation, with a firing squad and a group of Spaniards going to their deaths shouting Vivan las caenas — long live chains. That cry is not a Buñuel invention. It is the real slogan that greeted the restoration of absolutist monarchy in Spain a few years later, a documented instance of a people cheering for their own subjugation, and Buñuel puts it in the first two minutes as the film’s only stated thesis. He shoots the sequence with the composition of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, the painting every Spanish schoolchild knows, and then he leaves the nineteenth century and does not return.

From there the relay begins. A modern Parisian family, a nanny in a park, a hotel in the provinces, a police academy, a hospital, a school, a zoo. Each episode is self-contained, entirely straight-faced, and organised around one inversion of ordinary life that everyone on screen finds unremarkable. Buñuel stocked it with the best cast in France — Michel Piccoli, Jean-Claude Brialy, Monica Vitti, Michael Lonsdale, Jean Rochefort, Adolfo Celi, Julien Bertheau, Milena Vukotic, Adriana Asti — most of whom appear once and vanish. Knowing that in advance is a kindness: the first-time viewer’s instinct is to memorise faces for later, and there is no later.

Why it works: the handoff

The technique is worth watching closely, because Buñuel is doing something more precise than randomness. Each handoff is motivated — a minor character walks out of one story and into the next, a piece of furniture is delivered, a nurse takes a room at an inn — so the film never feels arbitrary while you are inside it. The joins are as smooth as any conventional narrative’s. What Buñuel has removed is the payoff, the sense that the film is accumulating anything you will be permitted to spend.

The effect is unnervingly close to how a day actually passes. You overhear an argument on a train, become briefly invested, get off at your stop, and never learn how it ended. Cinema almost never permits this, because cinema is in the business of resolution, and its unbroken promise that setups will pay off is so deep in the grammar that we mistake it for realism. Buñuel’s film is the more honest account of a life. Nothing pays off. Everyone you pass is the protagonist of a story you will not be told.

The other reason the structure works is that it makes each episode a loaded weapon. Because there is no plot to protect, no character arc to service, every sequence can be built entirely around one idea and detonated at full strength. A conventional film has to spend its second act on maintenance. The Phantom of Liberty has no maintenance to do, so it delivers a new invention every eight minutes for a hundred minutes, which is a rate of return almost nothing else in the period can match.

Why it works: the inversion, played flat

The film’s most famous sequence is a dinner party, and I can describe its mechanics without spoiling anything because the pleasure survives foreknowledge. Guests arrive at an elegant apartment, are shown to the table, and take their places on lavatories arranged around it, trousers around ankles, conversing pleasantly about the weather and the sewage crisis. When one of them is hungry, he asks quietly where the little room is, is directed down a corridor, locks himself in a cubicle, and eats a small meal alone in shame.

Everything about the staging is normal. The lighting is warm, the framing is the framing of any drawing-room comedy, the performances are impeccably relaxed, and nobody comments. That is the entire craft of it. A lesser director would have found an angle to signal the joke — a wide lens, a reaction shot, a musical cue — and the sequence would have collapsed into sketch comedy. Buñuel films it as though he is covering a real dinner in a real apartment, and the result is a piece of satire so clean that thirty seconds in you stop noticing the inversion and start listening to the conversation, which is precisely the state of mind the film wants to catch you in. Convention is not defended by argument. It is defended by nobody remarking on it, and the sequence proves this by making you complicit inside half a minute.

The same move recurs throughout. A man distributes postcards to strangers in a park with the furtiveness of a pornographer; the images turn out to be picture postcards of monuments, and the recipients are scandalised anyway. A child goes missing and the search proceeds at full emotional pitch with the child standing in the room answering questions. Buñuel’s method is invariable: change one rule, change nothing else, and let the surrounding normality make the case.

The collector’s note

The direct ancestor is The Milky Way from 1969, where Buñuel first built a film as a relay of episodes; there he still gave the audience two pilgrims to hold onto as the centuries slid past. The Phantom of Liberty removes the handrail. Watch them in order and you can see a director discovering that the anchor was never necessary, which is a rare thing to catch on film — a seventy-year-old abandoning a safety device he had used since 1929.

The essential companion outside his own work is Themroc, Claude Faraldo’s wordless French comedy from a year earlier, which goes after the identical target — the bourgeois arrangement as an unremarked-upon absurdity — with a sledgehammer where Buñuel uses a butter knife. The two films together are the best possible argument that satire’s weapon matters less than its temperature. And for the older, angrier root of the same tree, L’Age d’Or is where Buñuel first put a formal dinner party on screen in order to ruin it, in 1930, at a cost of getting the film banned for half a century. The 1974 model is the same machine, refined until it purrs.

Anyone chasing the register — impossible things reported without astonishment — should also try The Saragossa Manuscript, which nests its stories rather than dropping them, and Belle de Jour, where the same flatness is applied to fantasy and reality until neither can be told apart.

The honest case against

The film’s structure is also its ceiling. Because nothing accumulates, nothing can devastate; the picture is a hundred minutes of consistently excellent sketches with no possibility of a cumulative blow, and a viewer who wants to be moved will leave unmoved. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is the better film for exactly this reason — its dinner party that never happens is a single sustained idea that tightens, where Phantom only ever restarts.

The episodes are also unequal, and Buñuel’s refusal to arrange them by strength means the finest sequence arrives early and the film spends its back half unable to match it. He would have said that arranging them by strength was precisely the sort of narrative servility he was refusing. He would have been right and the back half would still be weaker.

The verdict, above the line

This is the freest film of Buñuel’s career and one of the funniest films of the 1970s, made by a man who had run out of anything to prove and used the freedom to demonstrate that the load-bearing wall of narrative cinema was decorative all along. It rewards a second viewing more than almost anything in his filmography, because once you stop waiting for the through-line you can attend to what he is actually doing, which is a great deal. Find it in the boutique restorations that keep the French late period in print.

Everything above is safe. The closing movement and the film’s sharpest inversion go below.

Spoilers below

The sequence people argue about is the sniper. A man ascends the Tour Montparnasse, assembles a rifle, and shoots strangers in the street below with the calm of a man doing the crossword. He is caught, tried, and sentenced to death — and then walks out of the courtroom a free man, signing autographs, shaking hands, mobbed by admirers. The verdict and the celebrity are simply concurrent; nobody in the film registers a contradiction. Buñuel filmed this in 1974, and it has become one of those sequences that gets more accurate every decade rather than less. The joke was about the incoherence of a society that condemns and celebrates in the same breath; it now reads as straight reportage on the manufacture of infamy.

Alongside it sits the prefect of police, who receives a telephone call from his sister, four years dead, inviting him to meet her — and goes, to a crypt, where he takes the call at her tomb, and where the film treats the resulting scandal as a matter of professional decorum rather than of physics. He is arrested. The man who replaces him is also the prefect of police, played by a different actor, in the same office, and the film declines to explain which of them is real or whether the question means anything. Buñuel is doing to identity what he did to plot: removing it to see if anyone notices.

Then the ending, which is the best joke in the film because it is not a joke. The two prefects drive to the Vincennes zoo, where a demonstration is being suppressed. The camera stays outside. We hear the crowd, the orders, the gunfire — and Buñuel simply refuses to show it, cutting instead to the animals. The last shot of the film is an ostrich, which regards the lens for a long moment, and blinks, and walks away. Off-screen, faintly, the cry from Toledo in 1808 comes up again: long live chains.

That circle is the whole picture. Buñuel opens on people cheering for their own repression and closes on people being shot for resisting it, and between those two points he puts a hundred minutes of drawing-room absurdity in which no one ever questions the arrangement they live inside. The ostrich is the audience — present, unblinking, incapable of doing anything about what is happening in the next field, and beautifully oblivious. My verdict: the most enjoyable major work by a man who spent his whole life refusing to be enjoyable, and the closest cinema has come to proving that plot is a habit rather than a necessity. The bird is still watching.