The Phantom of Liberty (French: Le Fantôme de la liberté) is a 1974 surrealist comedy drama film co-written and directed by Luis Buñuel, produced by Serge Silberman and starring Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau and Jean-Claude Brialy.
It features a nonlinear plot structure that consists of various otherwise unrelated episodes linked only by the movement of certain characters from one situation to another and exhibits Buñuel's typical ribald satirical humor combined with a series of increasingly outlandish and far-fetched incidents intended to challenge the viewer's pre-conceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality.
In 1808,[b] during the Napoleonic occupation of Toledo, a firing squad executes a small group of Spanish rebels who cry out "Long live chains!"
In revenge, the captain exhumes the noblewoman's corpse to find her face remains intact, intending to commit necrophilia.
In a modern-day Parisian park, a suspicious-looking man gives two young girls a set of pictures, while their nannies are reading about the 1808 events.
That night, Mr. Foucauld cannot sleep due to a series of visitations in his bedroom: a rooster, a postman delivering a letter, and an ostrich.
Soon, the assistant dons a dominatrix outfit and proceeds to whip the hatter, who is wearing bottomless trousers, in front of the other guests, who are shocked and leave.
The following day, the nurse leaves for Argenton and gives a lift to a professor who gives a lecture to a classroom of policemen who behave like unruly schoolchildren.
To illustrate a point he is making about the relativity of customs and laws, the professor recounts a dinner party he once attended at his friends' house, where the guests sat around the table on flushing toilets.
[3]The film contains short incidents and scenarios collected from throughout Buñuel's life, arranged in the style of a surreal game where seemingly disconnected ideas are linked by chance encounters.
When the Carmelite says "If everyone prayed every day to Saint Joseph, peace and quiet would prevail", this was a quote that had stuck with Buñuel when he was visiting a monastery in the 1960s.
One of the most poignant biographical details used in The Phantom of Liberty is the sequence when the doctor tries to avoid telling his patient that he has cancer of the liver.
[3] This sentence refers to the way in which the idea of Communism was being used pejoratively by the authorities in the mid-19th century to attack all political parties opposed to the established order (church, aristocracy and state).
[citation needed] The title of The Phantom of Liberty is also taken from this line of dialogue from his 1969 film The Milky Way: "I experience in every event that my thoughts and my will are not in my power.
Indeed, this is a film that deals with a variety of transgressive subjects such as fetishism, necrophilia, incest, mass murder, sadomasochism, and pedophilia with a network of storytelling devices and narrative forms and presents an intense criticism against established social institutions.
"Le Fantôme de la Liberté" is dozens of stories that lead from one to another with a dreamlike logic, and a dream-like way of never quite arriving at a neatly satisfactory conclusion.