The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962)
Cast: Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal, Claudio Brook, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico, Antonio Bravo, Jacqueline Andere, César de Campo, Rosa Elena Durgel, Lucy Gallardo, Enrique García Álvarez. Ofelia Guilmáin, Nadia Haro Oliva, Tito Junco, Xavier Loyà, Xavier Massé, Ofelia Montesco, Luis Beristáin, Patricia Morán, Patricia de Morelos, Bertha Moss. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Production design: Jesús Bracho. Film editing: Carlos Savage. Music: Raúl Lavista. The Exterminating Angel teeters occasionally on the brink of heavy-handed satire – the sheep entering the church at the film’s end, for example – but somehow Luis Buñuel always recovers his balance. I think it’s because he knows that surrealism – the movement which gave him birth – must always be underpinned by a dutiful semi-documentary realism, that we must never be entirely sure whether the improbable characters we’re encountering and the unlikely events we’re witnessing are external to us or are products of our own unstable minds. Take the déjà vu effect near the beginning of the film, when we witness the guests arriving at the mansion of the Nobiles and ascending the staircase only to watch the same scene repeated almost immediately from a somewhat different angle. For a moment we wonder if the projectionist has put on the wrong reel or the film editor has forgotten to excise the repeated scene. Or perhaps we wonder if we dozed off for a second and missed something that would explain the repetition. But no, the director must be playing with us, we conclude. That, or we’re trapped in his own world, just as he is to trap the guests inside a room later, never bothering to provide an explanation of the force that keeps them there. It’s one of those tricks that can only work in the movies, where we, like the house guests, have gathered and found ourselves unable to escape. We can choose to escape from the experience The Exterminating Angel presents to us – nothing prevents us from leaving the theater or turning off the video – but we don’t. So there’s much to be said for the observation that the house guests are us, that Buñuel’s point is not just that the Spanish bourgeoisie of the Franco years were seething in their own corruption and inertia, but also that we are all trapped by something in our psyches and/or societies that limits and lames us.
