La voie lactée

Luis Buñuel (1969)

It was twenty minutes or so in that I realised I’d seen it before at BFI (and as part of a Buñuel season) …  My only and lame excuse for forgetting is that the subject matter isn’t what you’d guess from the title.   The original name of the Milky Way was ‘the way of St James’.  The narrative thread to the film – which Pauline Kael described as ‘a guided tour of heresies’ – takes two pilgrim-tramps (Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff) from their starting point in France to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where the bones of the apostle James are meant to be buried.   The film is witty and Buñuel ‘s antipathy to religion is conveyed more strongly thanks to the sprightly tone, but it doesn’t appear to have many points to make.  A legend on the screen at the end stresses that each of the heresy episodes is based on scripture or church history.  The Milky Way would be a futile exercise if that wasn’t the case:  if Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, with whom he wrote the screenplay, needed to invent in order to advance the argument that Christian dogma is ridiculous, they would risk looking foolish themselves.   There’s no danger of Luis Buñuel doing that.

The film depends a good deal on the originality and style of its various parts and there are plenty of highlights.  At a Catholic school concert, the performing children solemnly pronounce a series of heresies as anathema.  A maître d’hôtel (the superb Julien Bertheau) conducts brisk theological debates on the dual nature of Christ with his intellectually curious but always respectful staff.  Two seminarians (the charming Denis Manuel and Daniel Filon) swap their clerical garb for the clothes they steal from a couple of hunters who are swimming in a lake.   After discarding a rosary found in one of the pockets of their new outfits and having it returned to them by the Virgin Mary, the pair spend a curious evening and night at a Spanish inn.  The vivid eccentrics in evidence there include the innkeeper (Marcel Pérès ) and a priest (Julien Guiomar), who is both a fine storyteller and a determined preacher.  (When he’s locked out of the young men’s rooms, he takes to instructing them from the corridor outside and materialises in front of them a couple of times.)  Bernard Verley, who plays Jesus Christ, puts over something of the disturbing sense of humour you sometimes infer from the gospels.  It’s noticeable that Buñuel has it in for Jesus no less than he does for organised religion as an instrument of tyranny and brutal prejudice – there’s no evident distinction between the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ here.  Michel Piccoli has a good bit as the Marquis de Sade; the remarkable cast also includes, among many others, Edith Scob (the Virgin Mary), Pierre Clémenti (the Devil) and Delphine Seyrig (a prostitute).

The succession of costumes clerical and historical and the interaction of characters from different periods (they sometimes bump into each other in the same woodland settings) combine to convey what Buñuel sees as the malignant persistence of Christian beliefs.  At the same time, Raymond Durgnat in his study of Buñuel seems to me spot on when he writes that The Milky Way ‘compounds the cinema’s usual discontinuities of space with discontinuities of time’ and ‘engenders … a Christian sense of eternity’.   An extract from Durgnat’s book formed one half of the BFI programme note.  The other half was an excerpt from Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh:

‘… The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all … the film is above all a journey through fanaticism … The road travelled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology. …’

As Buñuel must have known, this is disingenuous.  If he wanted his audiences to understand that he had any kind of fanaticism in mind, why did he stick with his own well-travelled road of using religion, and religion alone, as the exemplar?

14 June 2012