Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
After dumping a bucket of water on a beautiful young woman from the window of a train car, wealthy Frenchman Mathieu, regales his fellow passengers with the story of the dysfunctional relationship between himself and the young woman in question, a fiery 19-year-old flamenco dancer named Conchita. What follows is a tale of cruelty, depravity and lies -- the very building blocks of love.
Buñuel's final film is a masterclass in surrealist wit, most famously casting two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina) interchangeably as Conchita without comment — a stroke of pure conceptual audacity that earns a genuine Novelty 4. Fernando Rey delivers a superb performance as the obsessed, self-deceiving Mathieu, and the ensemble benefits from the charged ambiguity the dual-casting creates, warranting a strong Acting mark. The plot — a framing-device recounting of a maddening erotic pursuit — is clever and richly ironic, though Buñuel's episodic, deliberately repetitive structure is a feature and a slight limitation simultaneously, landing it at a solid 3. Cinematography is functional and elegant but not visually adventurous for its era. The ending, with its abrupt terrorist explosion, is memorably cryptic and thematically resonant, though it divides opinion and feels more like a provocation than a fully satisfying resolution.