elvircorhodzic
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL is a surrealist drama about a high class as social parasites, which are gathered in one place.After a visit to an opera, a group of fashionable people from high society has gathered at a party in a villa of a respected gentleman and his wife. However, their servants unaccountably leave their posts. The guests enjoy a luxurious and somewhat strange party. They notice, after dinner, that's all the servants gone, and that they can not get out of a music salon, even though all the doors and windows are open. The guests consume what little drinks and food are left from the previous night's party. Days pass, and their situation is complicated. They become hungry, thirsty, sick and hysterical...Mr. Buñuel has offered a strange display of human degradation, which has brought depression and hostility in a civil conflict. He has, through a surreal approach, manipulated with the characters, pulling out all the best and worst characteristics from them. An isolation is a mystery in this film. However, an isolation is a form of decision in the real world.Mr. Buñuel has showed us one of the characters of a privileged society, which is symbolically lost in its sole discretion. The story is a quite nervous and depressed, the pace is engrossing and transitions are explosive.Director's focus is on his people and situations in the society to which he belongs. This exceeds a surreal character and satire in this film.The acting is very good. I would mention Silvia Pinal (Leticia), as the voice of reason and realization.This is an unusual and frustrating game, which examines the patient with the audience.
bobsgrock
Is there any hope for the future of mankind? Fifty years ago, famous Surrealist director Luis Bunuel pointed his acerbic finger at the upper class in this incredibly focused satire of the bourgeois. Such a story as this depends on the audience's ability to look past little details such as a lack of growing facial hair on the men stuck in the living room and accept everything Bunuel throws at us.It seems the most vicious attacks are saved for the Church, which Bunuel seems to view as having similar rules and restrictions as the bourgeois does but with the added promise of eternal salvation in the afterlife. The final sequence of this film is powerful in the way it showcases the bourgeois's almost complete indifference to the struggle and pain of others, even after they have suffered similar conditions. Perhaps the main reason for this film's lasting impact, and the beginning of a whole new career for Bunuel, is its completely unflinching look at what lies at the root of all human beings. In taking away their physical freedom and psychological dressings, Bunuel exposes these people for what he believes we really are: slightly more intelligent, but still animals in every other sense. Our inevitable decline into savagery, incivility and pure selfishness can only be exposed in the most extreme conditions. However, who is to say this isn't possible in some distant future?
bbrooks94
Luis Bunuel's film follows a dozen or so members of an upper class society in Mexico City attend a dinner party at a large mansion where, for no apparent reason, they find themselves unable (psychologially, not physically) to leave a music room. The film then plays out like a survival horror film (although a more surreal and poetic one) with the characters resorting to suicide, madness, delirium and intense frustration as they attempt to grasp the unbelievable Kafkaesque and Borgesian situation thrust upon them. It's important to note that the madness and helplessness ensues only after the house's servants and cooks have left the building, thus suggest that without someone to aid them or keep the order, the rich resort to savagery and are incapable of surviving amongst themselves. A scathing attack on religion and the bourgeois, Buneul's film is a sublime watch.
Jarrod Bonner
This is probably my favorite Bunuel feature. It combines the surrealist potential of his more abstract works, such as Un chien Andalou, with a solid, if absurd, plot. In this case, a group of bourgeois party goers find themselves unable to leave a room. It gets pretty absurd as they have to bust a pipe in the wall for water and slaughter a lamb for food.Meanwhile outside, no one is able to penetrate the building to save them. It's all pretty absurd and the results are hilarious. It's a premise that would make a great Monty Python skit and somehow makes for a great feature length film, too!
AD
