Product Description

After a lavish dinner party in a stately mansion, the guests find themselves mysteriously unable to leave the room. As the days pass the elaborate pretences and facades that they've built up by virtue of their position in society collapse completely as they become reduced to living like animals to survive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106998 in DVD
• Rating: Unrated
• Formats: PAL, Full Screen, Black & White
• Subtitled in: English
• Running time: 93 minutes

Features

• Spanish Audio Only
• Optional English subtitles
• All Region Disc

Customer Reviews

Terrific director, Terrific film...however....
Anyone familiar with Bunuel knows this is one of his best. The image & sound are acceptable; this is the best Region 1 or 2 version I know of available. However, throughout the film Bunuel intentionally repeated some actions, conversations, etc. , and though many of those duplications are here, I noticed 1 in particular that wasn't. When the guests enter the mansion the scene should be repeated from a slightly different angle a second time, but for some reason that scene is missing from this version. I can only hope Critetion releases this someday.

The First Disaster Movie
This is a masterpiece dealing with the role of rules and manners as vestments of identity and superiority and what happens when they disintegrate. Like William Golding's Lord of the Flies, it deals with how human beings behave in the face of the breakdown of order, but it does so to the powerful.

The subjects are the mid 20th century European bourgeoisie and the situation - a grand dinner, the perfect arena for the display of rules and manners adopted by the ruling classes. The guests here are not children stranded on a desert island with no adults to tell them what to do - but they might as well be, as the fact of their inability to leave the dining room starts to eat away at their carefully crafted rules of behaviour.

Like a disaster movie - even comic parodies of disaster movies - different characters react in different ways, and different people break down in different ways, as their 'civilisation' is stripped away from them. There are no singing nuns, but there is a cheery encourager, a hysterical male who loses it and a moody reflective who almost enjoys accepting her terrible fate.

Bunuel's favourite targets were the bourgeoisie and organised religion in the form of the Catholic Church. He gleefully lifts the curtain on their pomposity and superiority to reveal the venal human beings behind the facade. Exterminating Angel is an excellent example of this 'Emperor's New Clothes' treatment and is my personal favourite.

The surreal device of the inability to leave the table is amusing, but its real job is to illustrate, at a point where the panoply of bourgeois manners come together - at the dinner table - what happens when they are slowly stripped away.

Times may change and the relevance of those particular targets may come and go, but you can swap in any powerful institution or group in any society and this treatment would still apply. That is what makes these films still relevant and appealing and this universality makes Bunuel one of history's great illustrators of the human soul.

"Let's Party Till Death Do Us Apart "
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

No one could throw a party on the screen like Don Luis Bunuel did - in his films people just can't get enough of the parties - they either can't get started ("The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie") or they are so sumptuous that the guests would never leave - in a perfect companion piece to the Discreet Charm.., "The Exterminating Angel" (1962), very funny comedy with very dark (as usual for Bunuel) humor. The funniest part is that nobody forces the guests to stay, nobody holds a gun to their heads or blackmails them. They just don't have a willpower to open the door and go outside where the police, family members, and press are waiting...not be able to make few steps to the party house and open the door from outside....

Once again Bunuel proves that he is one of just a few artists who could tell the same joke over and over again and get away with it creating the film as perplexing, absurdist, bizarre and in the same time irresistibly funny and clever as "The Exterminating Angel". Simply perfect.