- Director: Luis Buñuel
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Avant-garde / Experimental
- Movie Type: Satire, Surrealist Film
- Main Cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Monica Vitti, Paul Frankeur, Paul Le Person, François Maistre, Claude Piéplu, Marie-France Pisier, Jean Rochefort, Bernard Verley, Milena Vukotic, Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Michel Piccoli
- Release Year: 1974
- Country: IT/FR
- Run Time: 104 minutes
Plot
One of Luis Buñuel's most episodic films, The Phantom of Liberty focuses on no one particular narrative. In the beginning, a man sells postcards of French tourist attractions, calling them "pornographic." A sniper in Montparnasse is hailed as a hero for killing passersby. A "missing" child helps the police fill out the report on her. A group of monks play poker, using religious medallions as chips, and in the most infamous sequence, a formally dressed social group gathers at toilets around a table, occasionally excusing themselves to go into little stalls in a private room to eat. ~ John Voorhees, All Movie GuideReview
In his next to last film, the great Luis Buñuel makes a hilarious assault on the notion that the human race is in any sense free. As with many of his late masterpieces, such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Milky Way, the director strings together a series of anarchic events tinged with the surrealism that had been his signature since he helped found the influential art movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, a pair of detectives search for a missing girl who is right in front of them, and in another, a group of aristocrats defecate publicly at a formal dinner, while secreting themselves to perform the shameful act of eating. Always a faithful Freudian, the director insists on the powerful role of unconscious processes in determining our behavior and the arbitrariness of the elaborate social arrangements which result therefrom. Appropriately, the film opens in anarchy and ends with cries of "long live chains."~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide
Cast
- Jean-Claude Brialy - Mr. Foucauld
- Monica Vitti - Mrs. Foucauld
- Paul Frankeur - Innkeeper
Paul Le Person - MonkFrançois Maistre - Professor- Claude Piéplu - Commissioner
- Jean Rochefort - Mr. Legendre
- Marie-France Pisier - Mrs. Calmette
- Milena Vukotic - Nurse
Bernard Verley - Captain- Adriana Asti - Prefect's Sister
- Julien Bertheau - Prefect
- Michel Piccoli - Prefect
