That Obscure Object of Desire · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Mathieu carries a large burlap sack through several scenes of his own story, and not once does anyone ask what's inside it. Buñuel built a whole late career out of gestures like this: the inexplicable set down in the middle of a tasteful drawing room, and the room declining, out of breeding, to notice. The sack is the film in miniature — and so is the larger thing Mathieu lugs around for two hours and calls love. Her name is Conchita, a young flamenco dancer from Seville, and Mathieu can describe her to a carriage of strangers in humiliating detail without ever once managing to see her.

You feel the trick before you can name it. The woman he wants keeps changing faces. Here Conchita is cool and aristocratic, her refusals carrying the hauteur of someone who has priced you and found the price low; a scene later — occasionally inside the same conversation — she is warm and sensual, her cruelties wet with appetite. Two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, share the role, and Buñuel marks the swap with nothing. No cut you'd notice, no line, no dream to file it under. Hélène Plemiannikov's editing cuts on the conventional beats; the apparatus that normally guarantees a character stays one person is turned, with perfect nonchalance, to dissolving her.

It began as damage control. María Schneider left soon after shooting started, and Jean-Claude Carrière suggested they simply cast two women and explain nothing. Buñuel, eighty-one, said yes the way a surrealist says yes to an accident. What the accident produced is one of cinema's cleanest demonstrations of a difficult idea.

Deleuze calls it a crystalline description. Most films give you an object — a woman, a room — and then describe it; the description points at something stable you could, in principle, check it against. A crystalline description does something stranger: it builds its object and then replaces it, so there is no settled thing underneath to verify. That is exactly what the two Conchitas do. We keep waiting to meet the real one behind the two performances, and there isn't one. (Tellingly, the actresses were kept apart and never shown each other's work, so the difference is genuine, not blended.) The composite isn't a fuller portrait. It's proof that the portrait has eaten its sitter. What Mathieu loves was always supplied by Mathieu.

This is what Deleuze means by the powers of the false. Cinema runs on a quiet contract — that the image, whatever it shows, is at least telling the truth about its own world. Buñuel tears the contract up and makes the tearing the point: truth and falsehood about Conchita become undecidable, and the undecidability is the engine, not a flaw. Mathieu narrates all of this in retrospect, to a banker, a psychologist, a widow, and a dwarf, and the film hands him the floor precisely so we can watch him forge as he talks. He is, in Deleuze's word, a forger — the man who doesn't report the truth but manufactures it, and whose woman shifts identity because his story does. The interjections from the train remind us, dryly, that we are hearing a self-serving man describe his own degradation as someone else's folly.

Underneath the elegance runs something coarser, and Deleuze has a name for that too. The impulse-image is cinema of compulsion and slope — a drive that erupts under the social surface and pulls everything toward exhaustion. Mathieu's desire is exactly this: a hunger that survives every locked door, every relative arriving at the worst moment, every withheld near-seduction, and that never learns. The sack belongs here. It is a fetish in the strict sense — a part-object charged with a force no one will name, hauled through scenes that refuse to ask about it, the way the bombings that keep going off are stepped over like roadworks. The slope ends where it has to: the lovers watch a woman mend lace in a shop window, and the screen detonates, Wagner playing, bourgeois aspiration blown up on cue.

Buñuel didn't invent this terrain; he inherited it and split it open. Sternberg's Morocco taught cinema to film the enigmatic woman from reverential distance — and Buñuel adopts that grammar wholesale only to shatter Dietrich's single mystique into two irreconcilable bodies, proving the mystery was a projection the watching man supplied. From The Blue Angel he takes the cultured man's comic ruin before a performer who won't be possessed, and trades Jannings's tragedy for dry irony. Belle de Jour and Tristana gave him Fernando Rey's exact bourgeois obsessive and the flat, unsentimental interior light. And Bergman's Persona had already dissolved one woman across two actresses — Buñuel keeps the device and throws out the metaphysical anguish, replaying it as comedy.

What he leaves behind is an argument disguised as a farewell. Desire, he says, is always projection, and the screen is its perfect instrument, because the screen is where we put the face we need and call it a person. Watch it again and try to catch the seam between the two Conchitas. You won't. There isn't one. The seam was always in you.