Le Fantome De La Liberte (The Phantom Of Liberty)

1974, so late Bunuel, a series of tenuously connected vignettes that is one of Bunuel's most genuinely surrealist films.
We have spoken about the camerawork, which is of course not entirely simple but remains largely just a way of framing the action in a simple manner. Let's talk about the rest of the movie.
The connections between the scenes are interesting, playing on our guesses of who we will follow and what we will stick with. Within the scenes themselves this also happens; we think we can see something coming, yet it fails to. This is genuine surrealism; confounding expectations, even if what does the confounding can in actualy fact be rather more mundane than what we are led to expect to happen. Sometimes nearly nothing can happen at all, but we are kept on edge as we expect, we expect something to.
Not to say that there aren't some pleasinginly wierd things going on here, the non-missing child perhaps the most fun, and the oddly ambiguous nephew and aunt the most succesful.
This isn't Bunuel's best, it is rather a game with the audience than anything particularly powerful or larger than that, and on occasion may appear a tiny bit inconsequential for that. This shouldn't be the case; Bunuel is always doing something, whether he chooses to make it around a central narrative or not. Perhaps it works better when it is, but this nice change of pace is fun enough.