That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

That Obscure Object of Desire -- rereleased almost 25 years after its debut -- is the final work of the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and also his casual masterpiece, a mature commentary on the invisible line between passion and absurdity -- erotic, political, and religious. When actress Maria Schneider withdrew from the production, an inspired Buñuel cast two women -- French porcelain Carole Bouquet and Spanish terra-cotta Angela Molina -- as the shifting shape of Conchita, the object in question, who torments Mathieu, a proper, middle-aged French businessman (Fernando Rey), with her simultaneous expressions of romantic devotion and sexual unavailability.

Mathieu is at once the most average of besotted men and the most spectacularly ludicrous, a Buñuel hero of classic proportions. The film, meanwhile, only appears to be the most workaday of structures, a piquant tale told in flashback; the lightness with which Buñuel was able to insert the little jokes and knife stabs of surrealism he loved so much is, in fact, divine.

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