The Phantom Of Liberty

The Phantom of Liberty is in many ways a freer-form extension of the director's previous film, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972), sharing the same writing team of Buñuel with his regular collaborator, Jean-Claude Carrière, and many of the same cast.

Although thematically continuous with Buñuel's anti-bourgeois concerns the film would not be out-of-place alongside Woody Allen's Everything You LAways Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), released in the same year, or an extended Monty Python skit. In this respect it is an artistically weaker example of the director's typically excoriating work, relying on a peripatetic device to connect a series of absurdist sketches that illustrate in one way or another, the stupidity, hypocrisy and bad faith of the middle class,  Although it doesn't have the critical strength of the director's best work as a comedy it is often amusing, albeit played with dead pan irony rather than one-liners.

 

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