Luis Buñuel, a Spanish film surrealist and "legitimate follower of Freud and Lacan", was born in 1900, and Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, in 1901. Both grew up in Catholic countries where they attended a Jesuit school, and both were associated with important surrealistic artists of their time. For both of them, the subject of craving has become obsession. But while Lacan analyzes perverse, obsessive craving, film director Buñuel shows it, in a more obsessive, provocative religious and sadomasochistic manner.
Although he renounced Catholicism, it remained forever influential in his life and work. Often he was kidding, saying, "I'm an atheist, thank God."
Buñuel's film that extraordinarily describes sexual desire is That Obscure Object of Desire, inspired by Pierre Louise's novel Woman and the Puppet (1898). Two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina interpret the two personalities of one woman, a young Andalusian beauty Conchite, which becomes the object of craving for a middle-aged and well-off Frenchman Mathieu, embodied by Fernando Rey.Conchita, unlike Belle de Jour or Tristane, not only refuses the man who wants her, but also teaches him a lesson about his own, problematic nature, or his constant need for a woman who will always be inaccessible to him. With films Belle de Jour, Tristan and That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel returns to the surrealistic presentation of subconscious cravings.
This is primarily a "Lacanian" film, the pathological level of male craving and jealousy that as correspond with an external threat, but also serves as its own self-justification regardless of objective reality. Most of the narrative is made up of "flashbacks" of the protagonist, middle-aged and rich Mathieu, who retrospectively tries to explain to his companions in the train why he poured a water bucket on his wife. Referring to his frustrating relationship with Conchita, a young working-class woman, he also sought justification for hatred for her.
From a series of situations, his patronizing position towards Conchita is visible. He raises her and her mother with his money to gain her. Scenes that show that he is attracted to talk about fetishism. For example, he inhaled the smell of the handkerchief she left, and his face outbursts of joy and excitement when she says that she is a virgin. He tolerates some of her specialties only because he is convinced that he will own her as a mistress in the near future.
Mathieu meets Conchita when she starts working for him as a servant. He quickly becomes obsessed with her, and when he tries to seduce her for the first time, she refuses, leaving him confused. The action that Buñuel develops is showing us how their pathways are constantly met. Sometimes Mathieu is the hunting man, and sometimes Conchita returns to him. She causes it, and sometimes humiliates him and he sinks to an angry and pathologically jealous voyeur.
His narration is intertwined with episodes of terrorist violence (in the background there is shooting and bombing) and while the protagonist is distant from these events, Buñuel makes this a link between political and potential sexual violence.
Conchita is a subversive force that always forces Mathieu to violence. It is representative of terrorism as well as subversive groups that make political terror through several scenes that Buñuel puts into the film. Conchita's tightly embroidered trousers make it impossible for them to realize the sexual act among them, but they make it possible to intensify Mathieu's fantasy about it as an inaccessible and dark object of craving. Lacan says that the man more likes to live in dreams and dreams because cravings are more beautiful than reality, and if they do, they are never as close as they are in fantasy.
The object of craving is less important than the craving itself. The desire to desire. It does not look for satisfaction, but only its reinforcement. In this case, tightly embroidered trousers on Conchita allows this.
At one point she tells him: You want what I will not give you; It's not me that you want. If I'd give you what you want, you would stop loving me. If this is true, many would say that there is no love, but such obvious and subsequent cleverness to such characters is really not necessary.
Conchita expresses honest dedication or sudden repulsion, a desire to make him happy or crave to hurt and humiliate him. Throughout the film, we look at the repeated failures of sexual consumption that only she interrupts. To make the thing even more interesting, Buñuel hired two different actors for her role, with none of the characters in the film acknowledging this change of actresses in their appearances. Initially, Conchita's role was given to Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris), but due to certain disagreements between her and Buñuel, there was a turning point, so Buñuel decided that Conchita's role would be played by two different actresses that would represent two personas of the same woman, two sides of the same coin.
Buñuel did not explain why he had taken two different actresses for the same role, but the probable likelihood was that he wanted to show that the subject of craving was the least important. What really matters is that the craving does not cease to crave - and the object can easily be replaced by others.
It is exactly this change of two actresses to pass completely unnoticed in front of Mathieu. She, after all, says, "It's not me that you want."
What makes this film unique is the fearless look at a real erotic obsession that involves the cruelty of lovers, which does not come to the ultimate fulfillment. .
The end of the protagonists of the journey happens where it started, in the same city where the craving began and in the company of the same woman that a man can not be solved or possessed.
You might think Mathieu is an idiot, how can he dare to own, or buy, what he really does. Or you could say that his obsession consists in rejecting the order of the real world in order to experience the challenge and constant refreshment in capturing the elusive. You might also think that he gets what he deserves or that he should not have accepted Conchita's challenge. You may say that in her cruelty she is hypocritical and that her obsession is that she wants to continue to be his object of craving, just as he wants to continue to crave. The film certainly leaves an open and that 'Freudian' question: What do women really want?
Though it does not only offer such an answer (because it is not the goal of such a film), one is certain: anyone who sees in an impulsive, challenging and dangerous seductive world of subconscious desires also incredible beauty, will turn for that "dark object of desire" once more.
Note: This was my translation from Croatian to English from Ziher hr article 'Žudnja Žudi Žudeti: That Obscure Object of Desire' by J.Lovric
