Angel critiques the randomness of social custom when an upper-class dinner party turns into a ghastly episode of Survivor. Simon critiques the folly of human piety. Both movies are from Buñuel’s Mexican career (1950-1968), his greatest period.They represent the quintessence of his anarchic temperament, atheistic teasing and profound pity. In Criterion’s DVD versions, both films look better than ever, restoring them to an aesthetic excitement that challenges today’s simplistic F/X and superficial transgress imagery that degrade the Surrealist ideal.
In Angel, Buñuel outdoes Sartre’s No Exit, dismantling bourgeois decorum through a series of faux pas and discontinuities when guests cannot leave a mansion; he strips human behavior to its desperate essence, all under the rubric "Life is amusing and strange." David Lynch starts here but has never surpassed it.
With Simon, Buñuel jokes about religion with a depth beyond today’s knee-jerk atheism. As always, Buñuel’s theme is man’s desperate effort to escape his conscious, anti-social beastliness.This 45-minute parable about an ascetic saint (Claudio Brook) who stands atop a Byzantine column in the desert, resisting temptations by the devil (Silvia Pinal) and his own doubt is Buñuel’s greatest visual conceit. Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa’s cumulus-and-dust vistas idealize the symbol of Simon’s agonizing, perpendicular aspiration. Buñuel’s art tests his own wily atheism: scenes of a coffin scooting across a desert floor contrast with a disco finale ("Radioactive Flesh—the last dance, the final dance"). It humorously, compassionately demonstrates man’s failure to elevate himself.
We need both these films now to rectify the confusions that greeted a charming spiritual comedy like Nacho Libre and the gullible artsnobbery that greeted a trivial anti-spiritual film like Stellet Licht. Buñuel bounces back into film culture with vigorous intelligence and pertinence. If you don't know Angel and Simon, you don't what makes Buñuel matter—which means you don't know how great movies can be.
