#is what Mob needs to achieve his own catharsis

[scribefindegil]

Don't mind me just thinking about how Reigen ran into a hurricane with absolutely nothing to protect him and it wasn't a fraction as terrifying as simply standing in front of Mob and coming clean about how he'd lied

[moviesihaveseenbeforeiamdea-blog]

#409 The Exterminating Angel (El Ángel Exterminador)

Released: May 1962

Director:  Luis Buñuel

Written by:   Luis Buñuel

Starring: Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal

Had I Seen it Before? No

Did you know? Because some of the Aleutian Islands cross the 180th Meridian, Alaska is technically in the Eastern Hemisphere, making it the most westward and most eastward, as well as the northernmost state in the U.S.

I twice fell asleep while watching The Exterminating Angel. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the movie! It’s that I’m perpetually exhausted and overbooked this week attempting to sign over a lease for my current apartment while also trying to sign for a new apartment, an expedited process 

The first night I had tried to watch it I had a revelatory day of trying on my new pair of EnChroma glasses and seeing colors for the first time in my life, and got maybe thirty minutes into the movie before falling asleep. The next day I tried it again and got about halfway through before succumbing to biological need once more. Each time I tried to watch the movie again I restarted it from the beginning. Buñuel inserts the same shots of dinner guests twice on a few occasions in the film, repeating images and hinting that at least some of the guests are aware of the time loop. In this way, I can justify my attempts to watch this movie as furthering its point. By the end of my eventual, successful viewing, I felt as though I’d been with these dinner guests for twice as long I probably had been.  

The conceit of the movie is a wealthy Mexican couple hosts a dinner party for their equally wealthy Mexican social circle. The guests, opulent and beaming with the kind of out-of-touch airheadedness that is fun to characterize the bourgeoisie with but which ultimately undersells their economic and moral savagery, mill about the party until four in the morning, deciding instead to all spend the night without ever discussing why. In the morning, they are served breakfast and continue to socialize, until a few of them begin to think that Wow, isn’t it weird no one has left yet? To their horror, they find that it is impossible for any of them to leave the parlor and exit through the salon. 

The upper-crust before their comeuppance. I’m not going to identify them all, it doesn’t matter. 

What follows next is a series of spiritual degradations and inhuman indignations that would make Rod Serling blush. The guests become hungry, tired, scared, desperate, tense, aggressive, sick, suicidal, hysterical, angry, and hopeless. People outside the manor attempt to go in and rescue the socialites, but are held to their own invisible, impenetrable line.

The movie as a concept works wonderfully as a what-if? scenario, and as an allegory it is scathing in its contempt for the moral hypocrisies of its dinner guests. There is little valor displayed by any of the guests. Rational minds are treated with skepticism, then contempt, and then subject to the rage of the mob which doesn’t want rationality when catharsis-by-blood is a much more immediate and visceral release. 

It’s hard to get any kind of bearing whatsoever on who is doing what in relation to whom and where they’re doing it at. Buñuel does only the most cursory work at establishing his characters and setting before the nightmare starts up, and I’ve been convinced by reviewers of this movie that this was indeed an intentional directorial choice, a method of Buñuel disorienting the viewer from the beginning. For much of the film characters’ backgrounds and relations are vague, and it’s hard to get a feel for how they’re all getting along, as for most of the film they don’t come together as a group, instead panicking and rationalizing and scheming in discreet circles, away from the group as a whole. 

And, indeed, the first time the group seems to come together as a force with a collective will is in the pursuit of their scapegoat du jour towards the end. The socialites are caricatures, despite what the effusive praise of some guy on Reddit said in his review on r/TrueFilm. None of them gets too much individual probing, there’s no psychological examination of their actions a la Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit, which features three people trapped in a room with each other in Hell forever. Buñuel seems uninterested in litigating the guests as individuals and condemns them all to the same fate regardless if they’re adulterers, self-effacing colonels, a doctor, young lovers, a Jew, a Valkyrie, or simply rude. They are all going to die, and Buñuel wrings as much darkly comic sensibilities out of that as he can. 

The dinner guests again, not doing so well. 

I think, in the end, Buñuel tries to wring a little too much out of his concept. What would have been magical as an hour long episode in The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror fashion feels draining as a feature-length film. The direction does feel deliberate in its aforementioned disorientation and lack of spatially or temporally situating shots, and the performances are convincing (although I’m biased in favor of the performances in foreign-language films as I have no idea if their lines are spoken in convincing affectation--all Spanish sounds like Spanish to me). But wow, after a certain point I knew where it was heading and wished it would hurry up and admit to it. Though I will admit the eventual resolution of the parlor was a little surprising, it wasn’t incredibly so, and the ending was the best possible ending for a movie of this spirit but did feel a little obvious. 

This movie, much like Alice feels ripe for interpretation and discussion, probing what it means and what the viewer is supposed to walk away believing about what. Unlike Alice however, The Exterminating Angel feels dependent on its satire, whereas the undercurrents in Alice feels secondary to the bizarro imagery. That’s not a knock on either, simply different constructions of each movie. I might as well quote Roger Ebert’s analysis of the film since mine is similarly-aligned and I can’t express it without ripping the guy off:

Obviously, the dinner guests represent the ruling class in Franco's Spain. Having set a banquet table for themselves by defeating the workers in the Spanish Civil War, they sit down for a feast, only to find it never ends. They're trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac. Increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed. 

It’s a fitting enough description and one that contextualizes the movie without robbing it of any of its impact. Though I agree with it through-and-through, I also know next to nothing about any of the artistic and political contexts surrounding the film, so I think I’d agree with about anything anyone said about this movie within a certain range of political metaphor.

Final thoughts:

I’ll forgive it as a credit to its other strengths, but wow: the sound design in the movie is awful.

My first exposure to this movie was Owen Wilson’s character in the alternatingly charming and insufferable Midnight in Paris, in a scene where Wilson meets Buñuel in a cafe and tells him to remember the basic concept of people being unable to leave a dinner party. 

The surrealistic touches in the beginning are all wonderful place-setting from Buñuel that are shown but never explicated. The repeated shots, the exodus of the help, the bear and the sheep in the house, Ana’s purse stuffed with chicken legs--it’s all enough to throw the audience off their game and question why, if they saw what they believed they saw, does no one in the movie seem to notice?

The irony of choosing to watch a black-and-white film immediately after achieving color-sight for the first time in my life was an irony not lost on me. 

When is it we’re all going to get around to eating the rich, anyway?

I watched this movie on FilmStruck, a streaming service dedicated to art-house, indie, classic, etc. films, paired with the Criterion Collection for a larger selection. I started the 14-Day Trial, but who knows if I’ll renew when that’s over with. I tried watching this on FilmBox Live first, a similar service, but the website was truly garbage and couldn’t even hold itself together long enough to register me as a user. FilmStruck it is!

Recommended: Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, an existentialist play with a similar concept of people trapped in a room they can’t leave. I imagine Buñuel had to have at least heard of it; Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain; The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are On Maple Street”