Luis Buñuel

That Obscure Object of Desire

That Obscure Object of Desire

Luis Buñuel’s final film brings full circle the director’s lifelong preoccupation with the darker side of desire. Buñuel regular Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, an urbane widower, tortured by his lust for the elusive Conchita. With subversive flair, Buñuel uses two different actors in the latter role—Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette. Drawn from the surrealist favorite Pierre Louÿs’s classic erotic novel La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898), That Obscure Object of Desire is a dizzying game of sexual politics punctuated by a terror that harks back to Buñuel’s avant-garde beginnings.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1977
  • 104 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #143

Blu-ray Special Edition Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2000 with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
  • Lady Doubles, a 2017 documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, who share the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire
  • Portrait of an Impatient Filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, a 2012 documentary featuring director of photography Edmond Richard and assistant director Pierre Lary
  • Excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent film La femme el le pantin, an adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel of the same name, on which That Obscure Object of Desire is also based
  • Episode of the Belgian television program Le monde du cinema from 1977, featuring Carrière, actor Fernando Rey, and producer Serge Silberman
  • Conversation from 1977 among many of Buñuel’s collaborators, including Carrière, Rey, and actors Julien Bertheau, Muni, and Michel Piccoli
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation

Available In

Collector's Set

Three Films by Luis Buñuel

Three Films by Luis Buñuel

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$79.96

Blu-ray Special Edition Features

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Interview from 2000 with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
  • Lady Doubles, a 2017 documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, who share the role of Conchita in That Obscure Object of Desire
  • Portrait of an Impatient Filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, a 2012 documentary featuring director of photography Edmond Richard and assistant director Pierre Lary
  • Excerpts from Jacques de Baroncelli’s 1929 silent film La femme el le pantin, an adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel of the same name, on which That Obscure Object of Desire is also based
  • Episode of the Belgian television program Le monde du cinema from 1977, featuring Carrière, actor Fernando Rey, and producer Serge Silberman
  • Conversation from 1977 among many of Buñuel’s collaborators, including Carrière, Rey, and actors Julien Bertheau, Muni, and Michel Piccoli
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
That Obscure Object of Desire
Cast
Fernando Rey
Mathieu Faber
Carole Bouquet
Conchita Perez
Angela Molina
Conchita Perez
Julien Bertheau
Edouard, Mathieu’s cousin
André Weber
Martin, the valet
Milena Vukotic
Woman on the train
Maria Asquerino
Incarnacion Perez, Conchita’s mother
Ellen Bahl
Manolita
Bernard Musson
The police inspector
Muni
The concierge
David Rocha
El Morenito
August Carrière
Seamstress
Valérie Blanco
Her daughter
Pierre Pieral
The psychology professor
Jacques Debary
The magistrate
Credits
Director
Luis Buñuel
Screenplay
Luis Buñuel
Screenplay
Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on the novel La femme et le pantin by
Pierre Louÿs
Assistant directors
Pierre Lary
Assistant directors
Juan Luis Buñuel
Editor
Hélène Plemiannikov
Production designer
Pierre Guffroy
Director of photography
Edmond Richard
Production manager
Ully Pickard
Producer
Serge Silberman
Costumes
Sylvie De Segonzac
Makeup
Odette Berroyer
Sound
Guy Villette

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Luis Buñuel

Writer, Director

Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel

As made clear in his seminal works Viridiana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—delirious screeds against, respectively, religion and social conformity—Luis Buñuel was one of cinema’s great subversives and mischief makers. He began his career as a member of the French surrealists—his first films, Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or, absurd and violently sexual scandals that met with censorship, were collaborations with Salvador Dalí. After years of working alternately in his native Spain (where the scintillating, shaming faux documentary Land Without Bread and, later, Viridiana were both banned), the United States, and Mexico, Buñuel made most of his late films in France, combining surrealist non sequiturs with attacks on the bourgeoisie, the church, and social hypocrisy in general in such masterpieces as The Milky Way, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire.