Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch That Obscure Object of Desire
1977 · Luis Buñuel · That Obscure Object of Desire on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for the moment Conchita's face suddenly changes. (performance)
Two actresses play her, and the film cuts between them at ordinary edit points with no visual or sonic signal that anything has switched.
Payoff: You keep expecting a real Conchita underneath the two performances, and the film never gives you one. In the reading: crystalline-description. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description: an image that builds its object and replaces it, so nothing stable sits underneath to check it against.
Notice how flat and even the lighting stays. (light)
Edmond Richard lights scenes plainly, without cinema's usual flattering glow, closer to how affluent rooms actually look than how they're normally filmed.
Payoff: The camera refuses to fall in love with anyone the way Mathieu does.
Notice how often the film cuts back to the train. (structure)
Mathieu tells his story to a captive audience of strangers on a train, and the film keeps returning to their reactions to his account.
Payoff: Their occasional interjections remind you you're hearing one man's self-serving version of events.
Watch for the sack Mathieu carries and never explains. (staging)
He hauls it through several scenes, its contents never named, and nobody around him ever asks what's inside.
Payoff: The unexplained object sits there charged with weight the film refuses to name. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls an object like this a fetish: a fragment torn from the world and charged with a force nobody will identify.
Listen for flamenco entering scenes tied to Conchita. (sound)
Flamenco music recurs throughout her scenes, grounding her in a cultural world that Mathieu, a Northern European bourgeois, can never fully enter.
Payoff: The music marks exactly the distance between what he wants and what he can actually understand.
Once you have seen it
Notice how characters react to the bombings around them. (staging)
People step over rubble and past cordons with the mild irritation of commuters hitting roadworks, never treating the violence as alarming.
Payoff: The mismatch between the event and the reaction is where the film's darkest comedy lives.
Watch how calmly Mathieu describes his own humiliations. (performance)
Fernando Rey narrates degrading episodes with the same composure he'd use for someone else's minor misfortune, never registering his own self-deception.
Payoff: He isn't lying exactly. He's manufacturing a version of events he actually believes. In the reading: le faussaire. Deleuze calls this a forger: someone who doesn't report the truth but makes a convincing version of it up as he narrates.
Watch what plays under the film's very last image. (sound)
A fragment of Wagner accompanies the closing shop-window scene, right before an explosion ends the film with no further explanation.
Payoff: The music's grandeur and the sudden violence detonate the same bourgeois aspiration the whole film has been mocking.
Carry this in: Watch for the switch between the two actresses. There isn't a seam. That's the point.