The Phantom of Liberty (1974) on Netflix
In 1808 Toledo, a French captain caresses a noblewoman's statue and her husband's statue strikes him down. In Paris, a man gives two girls pictures that shock their parents, the Foucaulds.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.7/1018,686 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
The film is made of loosely linked episodes that share no central figure, and characters drift from one situation into the next. In 1808, during the Napoleonic occupation of Toledo, French troops are quartered in a church. A captain there caresses a noblewoman's statue and is felled by the statue of her husband. In a Paris park, a suspicious man hands two girls some pictures, and one of them shows the pictures at home to her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Foucauld. Both parents are shocked and aroused at once, though the pictures prove to be postcards of French landmarks, and they fire the nanny. That night Mr. Foucauld lies awake as a rooster, a postman with a letter and an emu come into his bedroom. His doctor calls these visits dreams.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gary Indiana says that Buñuel and Carrière wrote the film by "telling each other their dreams every morning"; its unrelated episodes, collected from Buñuel's life, are linked only by chance encounters.
- The scene where a doctor tries to avoid telling his patient he has cancer of the liver came from Buñuel's own life: he had been told he had a cyst on his liver, and he died of liver cancer in 1983.
- Buñuel used something he saw as a student in Madrid: a dead woman's hair appearing to "grow" from a tomb in the moonlight, an image he put into the film some fifty years later.
- In the 1940s, when he lived in Los Angeles with no prospects of film work, Buñuel wrote down the idea of a missing girl whose parents fruitlessly search for her while she stands beside them, invisible and yet not invisible.
