The Book of Life

THE BOOK OF LIFE            A                    

USA  France  (63 mi)  1998  d:  Hal Hartley

I could never get used to that part of the job.  The power and the glory.  The threat of divine vengeance.  But I persevered.  I was about my Father’s business.  It was the morning of December 31st, 1999 when I returned, at last, to judge the living and the dead.  Though still, and perhaps always, I had my doubts.

─Jesus Christ (Martin Donovan)

Following on the heels of the immensely enjoyable Henry Fool (1997), Hartley continues to play it fast and loose with this little one-hour gem, a romp in the park, a witty, entirely imaginative scenario facing the dreaded new millennium, all taking place 12-31-99 in New York City as the Y2K Apocalypse is fast approaching where all hell is supposed to break loose, only this time it’s the real deal.  Jesus Christ, the quiet, suave, yet troubled Martin Donovan lands at JFK airport in a clean cut, blue suit to meet with God’s lawyers, Armageddon, Armageddon, Armageddon & Greene to settle this whole Apocalypse thing and carry out the will of God.  Following close behind is the über-female, PJ Harvey as Magdalena, carrying a backpack with all the necessary paperwork, including a Mac laptop containing the seven seals in the Book of Life, three of which have yet to be opened, also including the names of the 144,000 souls that will be spared eternal damnation.  They check into a sleek, modern Manhattan hotel room.  On the way in, they catch a glimpse of Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool), who gazes, and holds his attention, as if recognizing someone familiar.

Ryan shows up in a coffee shop with Dave Simonds, a down-on-his-luck, compulsive gambler named Dave, and with a devilishly smooth sales pitch offers him a guaranteed winning lottery ticket.  “What’s the catch?”  “No catch.”  “I’ll have to think about it.”  As it turns out, Ryan is actually a sleazy, compulsively bad-news Satan, with a black eye and a bandaged cut on his face, called “Mr. Chuckles” by Dave, who recognizes that spew of venom and hopeless negativity about the end of the world coming out of his mouth because he’s been living it.  But then Satan turns on the screws, pulling into the game that sweet little waitress behind the counter Edie, played by Hartley’s gorgeous wife Mihi Nikaido, the one who’s been giving him free coffee and pretending not to notice, described by Satan as “terminally good.”  Would Dave surrender her soul in exchange for the winning lottery ticket?  Meanwhile we get a steady dose of William S. Burroughs on the radio as an apocalyptic preacher describing how doom and damnation will arrive no sooner than tonight.  When Dave asks Edie why she listens to that crap, she responds, “I like the hymns.” Edie, by the way, is so sweet and low key, she makes a terrific foil to the more manic and world weary Satan.  A compulsive gambler however can’t resist for long and eventually accepts the deal, and when the ticket hits, Edie decides she wants to spend her time serving homemade soup to the homeless, while Dave turns his attention to Christ “Can you help me?  I think I’ve just lost my girlfriend’s immortal soul for a long shot.”    

An extremely stylish film that’s obviously been Wong Kar-wai-icized, featuring a nonstop whir of colorful blurred images that seem to represent life passing by at the speed of light, where all of history moves in a passing instant, where each person, each soul, is a speck in the landscape. The dialogue is quick, fresh, occasionally brilliant, spoken with that precise comic timing of Hartley deadpan humor that is like no other.  From the opening, the fast talking, wise-cracking Satan has all the best lines, countered by the almost angelic good moods of Edie, but one of the better scenes is a meeting in a bar between Satan and Jesus where they toss back a few drinks together, where the Son of God must proceed with the business at hand which is about to get messy.  But Jesus gets cold feet and starts wavering, feeling uneasy about implementing the totality of a Final Judgment.  Satan reminds him He has no choice, that it’s all been prophesied in Revelations.  Speaking of those prophets, “I really never liked those guys anyway” Jesus laments, claiming He may have to break with His Father on this one, refusing to carry it out, as He’s always had His doubts about all that vengeance and wrath of God.  After all, He lived as a human once, and He’s grown fond of them.  Satan is fascinated by the startling developments and starts feeling a little brotherly towards Jesus, as both are now permanently exiled from God.

Well, of course, improbable things happen when Word gets out, including Mormons in a shoot out at God’s law firm, Satan finding a live microphone set up on the street where he offers a few choice comments, or PJ Harvey making a visit to a Tower record store where she sings a smokin’ version of “To Sir With Love,” PJ Harvey sings ''To Sir With Love'' - YouTube (1:16), with a dissonant screeching guitar in the background.  The music and sound design have an edgy subterranean groove that matches the feeling of a world on its edge, about to tilt on its axis, usually shot with oblique angles.  The provocative and colorful storyline always has a playful, yet dour mood happening simultaneously, where the free wheeling twists and turns are off the wall funny, including Yo La Tengo as a Salvation Army Band.  Hartley was one of the dozen international directors selected to make short films that dealt with the theme of the new millennium, commissioned by French TV’s 2000 Seen By film project, another of whom was Tsai Ming-liang’s THE HOLE, which was lengthened to a feature length film.  The film’s shorter length actually works here, as it has the feel of a concise, well-written short story with nothing extra tagged on, where the incredibly fast pace of urban life in New York City moves at near breakneck speed, almost like a 1930’s screwball sci-fi comedy.     

The Tragedy of Man (Az ember tragédiája)

THE TRAGEDY OF MAN (Az ember tragédiája)       B                     

Hungary  (160 mi)  2011  d:  Marcell Jankovics               Official site [hu]

At times overly bombastic, while at other times beautifully surreal, the director spent 30 years making this massive, nearly three-hour animated film, a work that feels like a lifelong obsession spent coming to terms with man’s futile existence on earth since the dawn of creation.  Adapted from the rarely seen Imre Madách play by the same title published in 1861, this is a play in 15 acts, set in 10 different historical periods, that has been translated into 90 languages and is considered one of the great works of Hungarian literature.  The story itself is a very long dream sequence mostly between Adam and Satan, who carry on a running philosophical dialogue throughout about the bleak futility of man and open each act in various disguises, usually joined afterwards by Eve.  While the film also includes 15 different sequences, the uniquely distinctive aspect of the film is each one was made with a different animation technique.  Also of interest, while the story deals with the creation and eventual fall of man, the most influential role is Satan, a decidedly sinister and malicious character whose sole desire is to destroy mankind in order to prove God, who cast him out of heaven, a failure.  Something of a parallel to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, an epic poem from 1667 published in ten books, both concern themselves with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and how they were expelled from the Garden of Eden, where in each Satan plays a prominent role.  But in this film, there’s 13 more scenes yet to come, making visits to ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, 18th century France, 19th century London, as well as the future, outer space, a distant future ice age, and back again to the beginning of time, among other visits.  While the film shows evidence of massive carnage, including beheadings, stabbings, suicides, and shootings, Satan takes Adam on a tour of the great civilizations at the height of their power only to see mankind’s noblest aspirations fail miserably. 

Perhaps the biggest flaw is the thunderous, overly chatty, and nonstop verbiage, including a completely redubbed voice soundtrack recorded just prior to the 2011 release, where the booming, over-the-top voice inflections all sound like the voice of God shouting down from the heavens, an uncomfortable practice that one quickly tires of, yet it continues relentlessly throughout the entire duration, where sound actually dominates and eventually overwhelms the sumptuous visuals, which was not likely the original intent.  Another problem is that this is a decidedly male affair, especially the dialogue, and while women are present, the action is nearly entirely male driven, where the prevailing view of women from the outset is a weaker member of the species.  It is, after all, Eve that hands Adam the forbidden apple, though in each successive scene Eve figures prominently in offering whatever hope exists for the future, where the film is to some extent a study of human relationships.  But it is also a battle of wills, where even as God is creating the universe, Satan, aka Lucifer, needs only a small foothold in the Garden of Eden to forever alter God’s intentions.  Possessing only two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Immortality, Lucifer goes to great lengths to influence Adam and Eve to defy God’s will, offering the promise of much more even as he convinces Adam that his life will be meaningless and that mankind is doomed.  Traveling to various points in history, Adam and Lucifer are introduced at the beginning of each scene, where Adam usually assumes a famous historical role while Lucifer acts as his attentive aide.  Initially Adam is all too eager to point out mankind’s greatest achievements, which are quickly countered by Lucifer only too happily pointing out the flaws and human weaknesses where mankind fails to live up to its initial hopes and promises.  While Lucifer acts more as Adam’s time traveling tour guide through various civilizations, Adam’s optimism diminishes through each successive historical period, until eventually he fails to grasp the meaning of his existence if mankind’s future is so bleak.            

Because of the ambitious scope of the film, spanning the entire history of man’s existence on earth, there is some comparison to Malick’s The Tree of Life  (2011), including overt Christian messages, where the choice use of classical music adds an underlying depth and complexity.  Much of the music and material, however, feel overly repetitive, where the length doesn’t add greater magnitude, as Lucifer’s monologues grow tiresome after awhile, preaching his same message of doom, made worse by having to endure the incessant shouting throughout.  It seems more important that each segment of history is examined, including the future, instead of creating a significant build-up of dramatic impact.  Perhaps the pastel beauty of the Garden of Eden sequence is the most colorfully lush, set in a primitive, almost Henri Rousseau dreamlike atmosphere, while the outer space sequences may be the least imaginative, appearing awkwardly dated.  But the film is a visual spectacle, where the seismic shifts in artistic design are intriguing, even as the storyline grows darker and more hopeless.  One of the more clever illustrative devices is the use of a Ferris wheel to evoke modernization, where a glimpse at each passing carriage on the moving wheel reveals different insight into history, including the emaciated, naked bodies of the Holocaust falling off the wheel in droves, while another glimpse allows us to see a rising and falling cavalcade of stars, where we are introduced to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, but also Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe, and the Beatles.  Perhaps the bleakest characterization of the future reflects the grim and colorless existence living under a socialist totalitarian regime where humans are little more than scientific specimens, newborns are not named but numbered, and interesting figures in history are punished for using their imaginations instead of continually performing the exact same assembly line task that all humans have been reduced to performing.  It’s a hopelessly dreary and pitiful existence where Plato talks only to the wind as a lonely shepherd and Michelangelo is seen as a disgruntled factory worker.  Adam grows older and more feeble with each passing sequence, as his spirit and life force are literally drained from him, awakening from his dream with suicidal thoughts, hoping he could prevent all this meaningless suffering from occurring, but Eve, of course, announces she’s pregnant, while God, who’s been absent since the opening sequence, returns to remind Adam to “have faith.”  It’s not so much a fitting conclusion as the film ends with a whimper back at the beginning, reflecting a cyclical Sisyphus pattern endlessly repeating itself.          

The Tragedy of Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (excerpt)

SCENE 1 - In Heaven, immediately following the creation.
SCENE 2 - In the Garden of Eden at the Beginning of Time.
SCENE 3 - Outside the Garden of Eden at the Beginning of Time.
SCENE 4 - Egypt, c. 2650 BC. Adam is a Pharaoh, most likely Djoser; Lucifer his Vizier; Eve is the wife of a slave.
SCENE 5 - Athens, 489 BC. Adam is Miltiades the Younger; Lucifer is a guard; Eve is Miltiades' wife.
SCENE 6 - Rome, c. AD 67. Adam is a wealthy Roman; Lucifer is his friend, Eve is a prostitute.
SCENE 7 - Constantinople, AD 1096. Adam is Prince Tancred of Hauteville; Lucifer is his squire; Eve is a noble maiden forced to become a nun.
SCENE 8 - Prague, c. AD 1615. Adam is Johannes Kepler; Lucifer is his pupil; Eve is his wife, Barbara.
SCENE 9 - Paris, AD 1793 (in a dream of Kepler). Adam is Georges Danton; Lucifer is an executioner; Eve appears in two forms, first as an aristocrat about to be executed, then immediately following as a bloodthirsty poor woman.
SCENE 10 - Prague, c. AD 1615. Adam is Johannes Kepler; Lucifer is his pupil; Eve is his wife, Barbara.
SCENE 11 - London, 19th century. Adam and Lucifer are nameless Englishmen; Eve is a young woman of the middle class.
SCENE 12 - A Communist/Technocratic Phalanstery, in the future. Adam and Lucifer masquerade as traveling chemists; Eve is a worker who refuses to be separated from her child.
SCENE 13 - Space. Adam and Lucifer are themselves, Eve does not appear in this scene.
SCENE 14 - An ice age in the distant future, at least AD 6000. Adam is a broken old man; Lucifer is himself; Eve is an Eskimo's wife.
SCENE 15 - Outside Eden at the Beginning of Time.

Pieta (2012)

PIETA             D+                  

South Korea  (104 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Ki-duk

Senselessly appalling and repugnant throughout, this pathetically dreary film features overly brutal, utterly despicable human behavior from start to finish, yet it stupefying won the Venice Film Festival, which makes one wonder what else was in competition?  Actually, this was not the initial choice, as while the speakers were at the podium announcing their awards, they initially awarded Best Film to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012).  However, the festivities were interrupted from a live telecast when a festival official whispered something into the ear of the speaker, where Venice rules only allow any given film a maximum of two major awards, and The Master had already been issued Best Director and Best Actor, awarded jointly to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix.  So after a brief but embarrassing delay, the Jury, headed by American director Michael Mann, handed out the Golden Lion Best Film to Kim Ki-duk’s PIETA ("Venice Film Festival Jury Yanks Top Prize from 'The Master' (Exclusive)").  Other overlooked films at the fest included the latest from Harmony Korine, Takeshi Kitano, Brilliante Mendoza, also Marco Bellochio’s equally dreadful Dormant Beauty (Bella addormentata) (2012), Ulrich Seidl’s downbeat Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube) (2012), Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012), which had the critics thoroughly confused ("Terrence Malick's To The Wonder confounds Venice press"), but also the near brilliant 2012 Top Ten List #7 Something in the Air (Après mai), Olivier Assayas’s autobiographical account of the political slide after May ’68.  Apparently the Italians held little interest in the French student movement, although in March of ’68 Italian students shut down the University of Rome for 12 days during an anti-war protest.  Kim Ki-duk is one of the few directors to receive more praise abroad on the festival circuit than he does at home, as he’s never been embraced by Korean critics or audiences, and was attacked ferociously in the press by film critic Tony Rayns in a November/December 2004 Film Comment article entitled Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk, claiming, among other assertions, that he’s a purveyor of gratuitous violence and misogyny purely for shock and that he “shamelessly plagiarizes,” something Western filmmakers quite commonly do.  Largely self-taught, from a lower class background with no formal training in film, Kim usually focuses on marginalized characters leading morally questionable lives that seem to exist in a universe all their own. 

What apparently captured the attention of the festival was the completely uncompromising aspect of the film, where at least on the surface, the film presents an artificially exaggerated view of a descent into a mercilessly brutal world that only exists in the world of movies, displaying a sadistically crude human quality that has come to be known as torture porn, where the audience is treated to endlessly repetitive sequences of sad and pathetic humans at the bottom of the food chain who are subjected to ruthless cruelty, where Lee Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a collector for underworld loan sharks, and if the money is not there he savagely breaks bones, feeding arms and limbs into industrial machines, or cracking them himself, turning his victims into cripples in order to collect the insurance money needed to repay their debt, subjecting each individual to excruciating pain and a lifetime of dependency on others.  This is shown in such a dispassionate manner, including all the desperate pleading followed by endless screams, that one quickly grows disgusted with having to sit through this nonsense.  The picture of Lee Kang-do is a pathetic wretch of a man, someone with no scruples whatsoever, that trolls the bottom of this Hellish existence by terrorizing weak and thoroughly moronic creatures who would idiotically stoop to borrow money from such an inhumane brute that prowls the neighborhood inflicting nothing but pain.  Out of nowhere, an older woman, Cho Min-soo, arrives at his door claiming to be his long-lost mother, apologizing profusely for abandoning him in childhood.  At first he finds it ridiculous and throws her out, calling her an “Evil bitch!”  But when she persists, he treats her with the same callous disregard he shows everybody else, viciously raping her on the spot.  Despite her prolonged agonizing moans of despair, she doesn’t leave him. 

Somehow this new mother in his life becomes an Angel of Forgiveness, pathetically sobbing her apologies, absolving him of all crimes, cleaning his house, buying him food, and regularly cooking for him.  Her presence suddenly alters his mindset, where he worries about her and begins to depend upon her kindness.  But she is more of an Avenging Angel, a kind of Satan in disguise complete with her own agenda, which sets him in an existential turmoil.  Due to the relentless monotony of neverending brutality, the film bears a similarity to Mel Gibson’s dreadful THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), as both are mindless and nauseating films that are little more than sadistic displays of human torture.  The problem here is the exaggerated tone, where every emotion is so over the top, where characters yell and scream at one another all the time, constantly bickering, calling each other names, making threats, carrying out their threats, screaming in pain, where the film is one long, continuously procrastinated revenge saga, ugly, grotesque, and mercilessly brutal.  Lee Kang-do comes to personify the lowest form of human existence, evil incarnate.  Some have suggested he’s supposed to represent the ruthlessness of capitalism, a heartless economic system that doesn’t care who it destroys, that hears no sympathetic pleas, but simply bulldozes and lays waste to people’s lives in a momentary frenzy of violent, catastrophic destruction, and then moves on to the next person.  Others find meaning in the title, where the Pietà is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture by Michelangelo, a subject in Christian art depicting an all-forgiving Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus, the first of a number of Michelangelo sculptures with the same theme.  Anyone who’s seen Kim’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), where the director himself plays the part of a monk, knows his familiarity with Buddhism and reincarnation, where this overly simplistic parable of evil incarnate seems to suggest that even the lowliest, most despised and hateful creatures on earth have redeeming qualities, where their lives can earn redemption, if not in this life, then the next, much of it underscored by the Kyrie eliason (Lord, have mercy) section of a Catholic mass.  The quietly poetic qualities expressed in the final few moments of the film offer a peaceful visual transcendence, completely at odds with the gruesome violence that comes before, where death chants in a state of perpetual darkness bring the film to a close. 

Simon of the Desert (Simón del Desierto)

SIMON OF THE DESERT (Simón del Desierto)         A                    

Mexico  (45 mi)  1965  d:  Luis Buñuel

Simon of the desert, who is the most free man on Earth because he has and does what he wants, without any obstacles. He is there on top of a column, eating lettuce. Total freedom.

—Luis Buñuel, 1965

I am still, thank God, an atheist.       —Luis Buñuel, in a 1960 L'Express interview

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’'t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t.                    

—My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel’s autobiography, 1983

Besides being a spiritual exercise, blessing is good fun, too.     —Simón (Claudio Brook)

Impossible not to like this film, pre-dating the savage satire of Monty Python, this one taking aim at the exalted ambitions of man, one of Buñuel’s most scathingly hilarious films, which starts out deceptively serious before unleashing a bitingly absurd commentary about the pretentious behavior of the church.  The inspiration for the film came from a 13th century book recommended to Buñuel by the poet Federico García Lorca, containing the story of St. Simon Stylites, as ascetic who reportedly stood on a column in the middle of the desert for 37 years during the 5th century.  Similarly set during the early era of Christian ascetics, Simón (Claudio Brook) is the picture of saintly piety, spending years of his life standing atop a small tower in the desert, denying himself all earthly pleasures, where he is already regarded as a saint, which unfortunately has gone to his head, as the ever serious Simón believes he is closer to God than other mere mortals.  There is beautiful camera work by Gabriel Figueroa whose high angle views of the lofty tower in an empty desert perfectly embrace the lofty pretensions of man to elevate their souls, with wonderful dialogue written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, who together also co-wrote NAZARÍN (1959) and VIRIDIANA (1961).  The last of Buñuel’s highly regarded Mexican films, Simón is seen as a heavily bearded Holy Fool, talking superficial gibberish to himself much of the time while believing his conscious is in an eternal struggle with God’s will, continually asking if heaven is ready to accept him yet, where the church makes daily visits to his tower, bringing him lettuce and water, but also praying with him while making snide comments behind his back, jealous that Simón receives greater notoriety than the learned bishops or priests. 

While Simón makes blessings and religious pronouncements, as if he’s become God’s spokesperson, he also criticizes others for not being pious enough, chastising a young monk for being too young, as he can’t even grow a beard yet, and then contemptuously pushes his own mother aside at one point when he comes down from the tower after he's been on the same platform for 6 years, 6 months, and 6 days (a Revelations reference to the devil) for a brand new tower just a few yards away that’s even higher, supposedly closer to heaven, specially built for him by a local businessman who he miraculously cured of illness.  This gesture appears particularly crude when we see that his mother has been keeping a silent vigil at his side for many years, living a solitary existence in a hut nearby where she can stand watch over her son.  Simón even performs a miracle, as a thief whose hands have been cut off by the local priests asks for a new pair of hands, which suddenly appear, whereupon he leaves to go home, hardly even amazed, without an ounce of gratitude, having received what he wanted, and then strikes his kids on the head with his new hands when they curiously ask if they are the same hands as before.  But there are those who question his sincerity, accusing him of being a charlatan, who are then struck mad on the spot, as if by divine order. 

At one point a visiting monk says to the protagonist “Your asceticism is sublime.”  But the real thrill is the presence of Sylvia Pinal as the devil temptress who attempts to lure Simón down from his tower.  She takes on various disguises, from a young girl in a sailor suit who bares her breasts and shows off her stockings, who magically appears on the tower next to Simón whispering in his ear, calling him weak and timid, poking fun at his slave-like devotion and his ridiculous display of pretense, a hypocrite who hasn’t an ounce of mercy, before turning into a Christ-like shepherd with a beard who at first fools Simón before tempting him to choose a life of sensual pleasure, so he immediately decides in absurd penance that he will stand on only one leg.  She immediately kicks a lamb and asks, “What kind of crap is this?”  The running dialogue between the two is priceless, as Simón asks Satan to repent her wicked ways.  Satan, wondering what would happen if she did, asks whether God would accept her back into Heaven?  Of course the answer is no, as she’s been condemned to Hell.  Satan indicates it’s only a matter of time before Simón will join her. 

No one despised the Catholic Church as much as Luis Buñuel, where SIMON OF THE DESERT and VIRIDIANA (1962) comprise two of the more devastating attacks not only on the church, but the moral hypocrisy of their role, where much like Dostoyevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov, the church no longer needs a living Christ as they have appropriated the religious message from God and replaced it with an infallible theocratic doctrine that only they control, forcing parishioners to submit to their authoritarian rules and dictates while amassing great power and wealth.  Too often the church overlooks the moral sins of its own corruption and the criminal activity of sexually impure priests in the interest of the church, which supposedly stands above all and governs by autocratic rule.  Buñuel’s films mock the churches power and the sheepish conformity of organized religion by asking the filmgoing audience to think for themselves and exercise their own free will, using Simón as Christ’s misguided and self-important religious fanatic, placing himself above man where he undermines his own special purpose.  Even the miracles performed by Simón are taken for granted, having little to do with God or religious faith, and instead are so routinely expected that followers would be disappointed if they didn’t witness one, eventually losing interest in Simón altogether when they don’t, becoming passé, where his message is soon forgotten. 

And in a wonderful image of an airplane flying overhead, Simón is whisked ahead into the future surrounded by tall skyscrapers where he and Satan sit at a swinging 1960’s New York City discotheque where writhing kids are dancing non-stop to the grinding electric rock sounds of a group called Los Sinners in an expression of sheer joy and sensuality playing a primitive piece of music called “Radioactive Flesh” Los Sinners - Rebelde Radioactivo YouTube (3:49).  Simón, now with short cropped hair, is smoking a pipe, looking very professorial, playing the part of an aging intellectual, serious and forlorn, while Satan in a miniskirt, smoking like a chimney, urges the dancers to keep up their frenetic rhythm as they frolic the night away.  Instead of ascending to heaven like he hoped and prayed for all those years placing himself on his own self-inflated pedestal, he’s instead whisked into a purgatory of Hell dancing with the Devil, a near perfect masterpiece that is rollicking fun.  Part of a religious trilogy with NAZARÍN (1959) and THE MILKY WAY (1969), the production ran out of money, cutting short what was intended to be a feature length film, but in its brevity becomes a more perfectly concise work with a singularly unique vision and plenty of Buñuel wit.