The Luis Bunuel Collection

DVD Extras

• 8 disc, Exclusive audio commentary on Belle de Jour from Professor Peter W. Evans' Trailers
• Art cards featuring original theatrical poster designs
• Booklet containing essay and filmographies.2 x 4 disc digipack

Film Details

Cast

Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Monica Vitti, Stéphane Audran, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clementi, Muni

Technical Details

Star Review

These are good times for Buñuel admirers: his Mexican films are finally making an appearance on DVD, The Exterminating Angel and Viridiana are now available, there's a retrospective at the NFT, and now here's a box set featuring eight of his last eleven remarkable films, a run on which he commenced at the age of sixty.
The set includes a first release of one of Buñuel's two 'American pictures', The Young One, made in Mexico with an American cast and a blacklisted producer and screenwriter. In its strong mix of head-on racism and underage sex, it was a bold film that showed how practical good deeds (from a white cabin trash racist) could come from hypocrisy and guilt, while good thoughts (from a well-meaning but ineffectual pastor) lead to nothing much but the preservation of the status quo. The film's symbolism is both straightforwardly sexual and tantalisingly oblique.
The collection also features all six of the films resulting from the happy collaboration between Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. They were an inspired, diligent pairing who made even unpromising material, such as a script based entirely on historical documents of Christian heresies (The Milky Way), compulsive watching.
Famously, Buñuel would feign a deafness more profound than he had already when presented with bothersome 'actor questions'. Mind you, with actors of the intelligence of Fernando Rey, Michel Piccoli, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve to populate his world - many in roles that their names automatically call to mind - he was very well served.
These are subtle, rewarding films with far more to them than simply the 'skewering of religion and the bourgeoisie', which is often as far as shorthand criticism gets. Their camerawork is self-effacing, they are subtle in their means and filled with easily overlooked moments of brilliance that complement the obviously unforgettable set-pieces. Buñuel insisted the essential mystery in all things should be maintained and respected. Do this, and with him you can gaze in wonder at the nature, customs and charades of those strange, contrary, hypocritical creatures called human beings, on whom he looked with such acute, mischievous understanding.

Graeme Hobbs on 18th December 2006

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Film Description

Eight excellent films from the incorrigible scourge of the bourgeoisie, hypocrisy and established religion. Features That Obscure Object of Desire, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Diary of a Chambermaid, The Phantom of Liberty, The Milky Way, Tristana, The Young One and Belle de Jour.

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