(1930, b/w; The Golden Age, French) Director Luis Buñuel's 60-minute, surrealistic critique of bourgeoisie society and its religious sanctions on sexual desire began as a collaboration with Salva d'or Dali; but following their artistic disagreements, Dali departed the project, leaving Buñuel with the unfinished script.

The film is divided into four parts: an examination of scorpions (arachnids with poison-tipped stingers, preferring a solitary life); a group of eight armed, desperate men, who appear famished and exhausted, one unable to follow the others to confront the Majorcans; an unnamed man (Gaston Modot) and woman (Lya Lys) repeatedly frustrated in their lusting to be together; the four atheist survivors of a 120-day orgy in the Château de Selling with "eight lovely adolescent girls" and four women of debauchery who whetted their appetites for criminal carnality - the final portion in captioned text concluding with the emergence of a Christ-like figure followed by three other men. Richard Wagner's Isolde's Death is the principal music in soundtrack.

Some hours after the scorpion strikes an intruding rat, one of the desperate men, having descended from the rocky cliff, informs the others of the presence of the Majorcans, a half dozen or so religious-garbed men sitting on a craggy height above the sea. Arriving on boats are scores of well-heeled visitors to the island, come to pay respect to the bones of the Majorcans when a couple embracing, rolling on the ground, disturbs the solemn ceremony. Two men escort the mustachioed man in a soiled suit and tie away, but not before he breaks free to kick a small, white cur amongst the crowd.

Taken to the imperial city of Rome - formerly pagan, now the seat of Catholicism - where someone is kicking a violin down the sidewalk while another carries a loaf of bread atop his hat, the man with the moustache imagines the woman of his desire in every female image he passes.

She, with a bandaged finger, is at home with her mother, discussing musicians and the expected arrival of the Majorcans at nine; in her bedroom she finds a cow lying in her bed before she goes to her vanity in which the mirror becomes an open window.

The man with anti-social habits produces a document from his coat pocket, to show the two men accompanying him just whom they're dealing with, which declares him to be a personage entrusted with a noble enterprise. Releasing him, they witness his knocking down a blind man before getting into an automobile.

Guests arrive at the Marquis de X's residence: flies alight on an elderly gentleman's face, peasants in a horse-drawn wagon pass through the assemblage of upper-class ladies and gentlemen, an explosion and conflagration in the kitchen produce no alarm or excitement among the well-mannered. But when a man shoots a child with his shotgun in the field outside, they all rush to watch from the balcony.

Dragging a dress across the floor before flinging it onto a chair, the properly-attired mustachioed man begins to converse with the mother of the woman of his passion who craves him; but when the older female accidentally spills a drink on him, he takes extreme offense and slaps her.

Finally the couple is able to sneak off into the garden together, gnawing on each other's fingers, as the guests gather outside for the musical program. When he notices the toes of a female statue, his adore briefly cools (a superimposed image of priests crossing a bridge, one turning back) before he resumes his love fondling.

Another interruption occurs when he's informed that the Minister of the Interior needs to speak with him on the telephone; while he's away, the woman sucks the statute's toes. Informed that he's responsible for many deaths of women and children (just some "brats" he replies) - the minister exclaims that he's been dishonored, before shooting himself (the suicide falls onto the ceiling). Returning to his inamorata, he treats her with tenderness and concerned affection; she gaily cries out: "What joy in having killed our children!" as he stands with a bloodied eye.

Suddenly grabbing his head, the music conductor walks away from his musicians in the direction of the lovers; the woman rushes to embrace and kiss him. Her former swain rises in a rage, striking his head against a hanging potted plant, to depart with his head in his hands, arriving in a bedroom where he tears a pillow apart, his fists full of feathers as he hurls objects from the upstairs window - a burning tree, a wooden plough, a priest, and an ornamental giraffe.

As the feathers are falling, the four atheist scoundrels emerge from their saturnalia, on their way to Paris as the film ends with a cross tilted in the snowfall.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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