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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Reviewed by Nick Burton
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Made during his prolific Mexican period, Luis Bunuel’s enigmatically titled The Exterminating Angel is the screen’s greatest surrealist nightmare comedy. A vicious slap at the upper middle class, the film's plot is so outrageous and original that it still has the power to outrage and confound decades after its release. But, as Bunuel has shown film after film, his comedy never gets too vicious. As with his 1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (a film which is closely related to this one in many ways), Bunuel ultimately shows as much compassion as scorn for his privileged dinner guests. Nonetheless, watching his characters squirm in the environment he has constructed, one senses that no one has quite as much fun watching as Bunuel. |
 The Exterminating Angel Starring: Silvia Pinal Directed by:Luis Bunuel VHS Tape - $20.95 Not Rated Subtitles in English |
The film concerns a group of formal dinner guests who have been invited to a lavish soireé at the mansion of Nobile (Enrique Rabal) and his wife after attending an opera. But the Nobile’s kitchen staff – with the exception of the headwaiter played by Claudio Brook – begin leaving after having premonitions of evil. The dinner is a success anyway, complete with the bizarre entertainment of having a waiter deliberately trip carrying a tray of food to the delight of the guests. After the dinner, the group repairs to the salon for conversation and drinks.
But after the customary phony glad-handing and insincere conversation (the doctor, played by Augustso Benedicio, tells his female cancer patient she has nothing to worry about, telling another she has little time to live), the guests find that they cannot leave the room. There is no reason for it, but they simply cannot go beyond the doors of the salon, open at all times and beckoning them to leave. At first, after a few of the guests have removed their dinner jackets and turned the lights out, others follow simply not to look out of step. ("Let us go to their level to attenuate their incorrectness," Nobile tells his wife as he removes his jacket.) The night passes, and the guests request coffee before they go, but the waiter cannot get out of the salon. They soon begin to realize they cannot leave and begin to starve.
As the days pass and hunger begins to breed hallucinations (a woman has a nightmarish vision of a severed hand scurrying across the floor and onto her throat in a scene as creepy as in any horror film) and recriminations between the guests. Tempers flare at the slightest provocation – woman brushing her hair is reprimanded for doing it wrong –and a closet full of antique urns and vases soon becomes the bathroom. The wall has to be chipped away at to get to the plumbing that will now supply them water, and the waiter suggests that eating paper will dull the appetite.
A crowd gathers outside, but just as the guests can’t leave, those outside cannot enter, and a group of children who can't get in are conveniently blamed ("You just can’t trust children!" an onlooker complains). Inside, a young newlywed couple who have yet to consummate their union, do so in the "bathroom" before committing double suicide, and an elderly sick man passes away. A bear and a pair of lambs that Nobile’s wife had brought to the house for a "surprise" for her guests, wander in and are quickly used for food, but by this time the salon is rubble, and the guests are close to killing one another. Nobile suggests he should couple with the beautiful Valkyrie (Bunuel favorite and Viridiana herself, Silvia Pinal), thinking the sacrifice of her famous virginity might do the trick. ("They say she still covets that object," a female guest gossips, "A perversion, no doubt.") But it is only when they find themselves in the exact positions they were in when they were about to leave the first time that they can finally leave. They make their way to a church to devote themselves to God after their ordeal, but as they go to leave, guess what happens?
It is a great film, written and directed with Bunuel’s economic style at its best. The Exterminating Angel embodies a disarmingly simple approach to filmmaking that rejects any attention-calling techniques and makes the absurdist notion of the film's Surrealist premise all the more effective. (Discreet Charm, shot in the same style, looks at times like a Surrealist sitcom.) Perhaps unable to resist the image of a bourgeois dinner party gradually turning into the Donner party (would a marooned group of farmers act as inhuman to each other?), Bunuel has conjured up some wonderfully memorable images. The film's most famous image – a flock of sheep entering the church where the dinner guests are fated to re-live their ordeal – still elicits a subversive smile. Don’t miss it, even though the print available on video cassette is downright shitty.
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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.