If you've seen "The Andalusian Dog" and weren't mentally prepared for it, the name Luis Bunuel may give you a slight nervous tic. However, the director's latest film, "This Vague Object of Desire," is an almost normal movie, with a logical plot and understandable motivation for the actors.
What remains of the absurdism that made his name are the gypsy women fortune-telling the protagonist, a mysterious bag, and a fly caught in a glass. And this fly still does not let us understand whether it is chaos breaking through reality, or whether we all live in chaos, and our mind creates a semblance of order out of disparate details.
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All these details - the fly, the rat in the mousetrap, the pig in the diaper - have been interpreted in different ways, and the dominant viewpoint on them refers to psychoanalysts, particularly Jacques Lacan, but the most interesting thing about the fate of this movie is how it is perceived today.
Psychology and psychotherapy have become such an integral part of life that even strictly professional vocabulary becomes public domain. Abusive relationships, patriarchy, and a variety of sexual complexes tend to crawl out into the light like blinded cockroaches, making most of the sharp angles of Bunuel's picture look like flaccid borrowings from the show Pregnant at 16.
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Normalization of the Madonna/whore complex makes the heroine almost positive, although it is quite obvious (and this is once again hinted at by all these terrorists and "superfluous" details) that the task of the film is not to find out who is right and who is wrong. If the viewer, like Mathieu's fellow travelers, gets carried away by the "legal" part of what is going on, the chance to interpret the title of the film correctly will be lost.
In fact, the purely plot part of the movie is explained by Conchita herself in one phrase: "You love not me, but what I deny you". The entire character of the hero in the movie comes down to his desire. He throws money around, but we don't know what he does, he goes to some city, but neither he nor we know why: it's like a character in a game with papers pasted on his forehead.
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Conchita perceives Mathieu accordingly, as one naked desire, but she is not a human being either, she is another character in the same game, and on her forehead is labeled "object of desire". It is said that at the film's screenings, the audience did not immediately realize (or did not notice until the very end) that Conchita is played by two different actresses, and this paper is the main reason for that.
"This strange object of desire" can be compared to an electric circuit: the circuit as such exists as long as there are poles.
In the space of the movie, Conchita cannot exist without being this very "object of desire"; as soon as Mathieu takes her under his arm, there is an explosion, and everything is plunged into the chaos that has been breaking through the "normal" narrative for the entire timeline. Right before this, we see a foreshadowing of the end - a wedding dress with defloration marks. The woman stitches it up, as it has obviously been torn in a burst of realized passion. Passion, in which desire disappears, poles interlock, chaos rules.