El ángel exterminador
Luis Buñuel (1962)
Set in Mexico and one of the last films that Luis Buñuel made there, The Exterminating Angel was shot in black and white (by Gabriel Figueroa) but it’s a thoroughly black comedy. The guests at a posh dinner party find they’re unable to leave the house at the end of the evening. There’s neither a physical barrier to their departure nor anyone actively detaining them in the house yet they’re stuck there. They’re complaining and frightened; they have alarming dreams and hallucinations; they come to blows, and worse; but they can’t exit. Roger Ebert, far from the only film writer to attempt a detailed interpretation of the piece, wrote that ‘The dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends. They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac …’ Other critics have advised against this kind of approach, enjoining us instead simply to revel in the film’s excoriating social comment and surreal imagination.
Although the angel of the title is a figure common to all three Abrahamic faiths, Buñuel’s inveterate hatred of the Catholic religion is prominent in various details of the film, which opens to the sound of a tolling church bell. The inescapable house is on Calle de la Providencia – ‘Providence Street’. The piano sonata played for the gathering by one of the women guests, Blanca (Patricia de Morelos), and which marks the starting point of their horrific predicament, is by the eighteenth-century Italian composer Paradisi. All but one of the servants in the household leaves the premises before accidie overtakes their social superiors: the exception is the majordomo, Julio (Claudio Brook), who reveals at one point that he received a Jesuit education. The hostess (Lucy Gallardo) means to produce three sheep and a bear as a zany coup de théâtre for her guests to enjoy. In the event, the sheep come to play a more traditional, sacrificial role albeit in bizarre circumstances: days into their ordeal, the starving guests roast the animals on a fire. At the very end – when the company, eventually released from its house arrest, is in church – a flock of sheep wanders across the screen.
Perhaps it wasn’t Buñuel’s intention but this member of the audience found the church choral singing in the closing episode plangently beautiful. And while The Exterminating Angel might seem quintessentially Buñuelian, the script, which the director wrote with Luis Alcoriza, isn’t entirely original. It’s adapted from an unfinished play (Los náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia) by Buñuel’s fellow Spaniard José Bergamin (1895-1983), a writer who, at least according to Wikipedia, ‘attempted to reconcile Communism and Catholicism throughout his life’. It’s striking that Bergamín (uncredited on the film) didn’t finish his play because Buñuel’s resolution is somewhat awkward. Leticia (Silvia Pinal) suddenly notices that all the people and the furniture in the room happen to be in just the position they were when, on the night of the dinner, their stasis began. She asks Blanca to replay the end of the Paradisi sonata, which she does, and for all concerned to remember what they said immediately after the music stopped, which they do. This breaks the spell but it feels like an escape route for Buñuel as much as his characters.
At the other end of the narrative, the breakdown of order gets underway immediately. The doorman (Pancho Córdova) insists on stretching his legs before the guests arrive and Julio fires him on the spot. On arrival, some of the guests say hello to each other repeatedly (though the tone of greeting keeps changing). In the kitchen, we learn that the main course is to be served first: that message doesn’t seem to get to a servant (Ángel Merino) who tries to bring a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the dining table for starters but trips and falls as he approaches. The unexpected images – a severed hand with a life of its own, the bear swinging on a chandelier – are remarkable, to put it mildly, but Buñuel also builds a gruesomely convincing picture of the accumulating effects of a sizeable group of people, deprived of normal home comforts, in a confined space. You hardly need one of the male guests, Francisco (Xavier Loyá), something of a loose cannon from the start, to tell Blanca she smells ‘like a hyena’, and that she’s not the only one. Manny Farber’s description of this rancid degradation (in a piece written in 1969) is worth quoting at some length:
‘… festering, pock-marked with strange crowdedness, bedding conditions, and particularly with powerful images – a Goyaesque scene of people in soiled, crumpled evening clothes, huddled around a fire built of smashed violins and eighteenth-century furniture, in the center of an elegant sitting room, and gnawing on mutton bones. … the women, crushed in boned evening gowns; the men, a little too old, paunchy Don Juans in opera clothes; the very outfits that would be most insufferable if you were forced to keep them on for two months – literally give off a steam of sweat, ill temper, physical disgust, a remarkable intensity of discomfort that hasn’t been seen before in movies …’
In retrospect, The Exterminating Angel seems like the first part of a diptych that The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) completes. I prefer the episodic structure of the later film, in which the dramatis personae have the opposite problem: they keep trying to have a meal, in various places, but never succeed. The characters’ plight in The Exterminating Angel occasionally gets a bit boring to watch. That doesn’t seem quite right – even if boringness is part of what makes their situation hellish. For some reason, I found those gathering on the street outside funnier than any of the prisoners – especially when a ghoulish crowd starts to break through a police cordon to get into the house then find themselves as paralysed as those sequestered inside, and turn tail (sheepishly). The end is strong, though. After the service of thanksgiving for their salvation, the churchgoers move towards the exit but get no further – a moment with the same kind of nightmare-beginning-all-over-again charge as the closing scene of Dead of Night (1945). This time, the potential spectators in the street outside are shot by military police and, in effect, replaced by the sheep that appear from nowhere and head towards the church entrance.
An academic from Warwick University – I didn’t catch the name – introduced this BFI screening. His intro was workmanlike but there was one point I found particularly interesting. He mentioned Buñuel’s continuing preoccupation with the idea of people trying but failing to achieve something simple – that’s clearly a hallmark of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and of this film, at least. It’s also an experience familiar in dreams (you try, for example, to close or open a door and the effort required is beyond you). It hadn’t occurred to me before that Buñuel’s surrealism puts this feature of unconscious life to dramatic use. One other postscript. This was the first time I’d seen The Exterminating Angel in a cinema but I had watched it once before, around half a century ago, on television late one evening. It may have been on BBC2 but I think it was BBC1. The idea of either of those channels airing a Buñuel film now seems a bit surreal in itself.
25 September 2024
