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The Exterminating Angel (1962,
Mex.) (aka El Angel Exterminador)
In Luis Bunuel's surrealistic fantasy-black comedy
about the degeneration of human nature [Note: In Woody Allen's Midnight
in Paris (2011), the Owen Wilson character, screenwriter Gil
Pender, sent back to the 1920s, suggested the idea for this film
to Luis Bunuel]:
- the sequence of a bourgeois hosted dinner scene
- after attending a religious operatic play about a naive virgin
("Virgin Bride of Lammermoor"), twenty members of the
vain, privileged class became dinner guests
at the opulent Mexico City estate on the street of "Calle
de la Providencia", hosted by aristocrat Senor Edmundo Nobilé (Enrique
Rambal) and his wife Lucia (Lucy Gallardo); (note that the guests
arrived twice in quick succession); after the meal was no
longer attended by proletariat workers (another repetition: the
cook and other servants had left - pictured from two different
camera angles), the steward Julio (Claudio Brook) was left to serve,
while Edmundo offered two toasts; afterwards, the guests retired
to the music room, and appeared to settle in for the night
- the unusual circumstance that by the next morning,
the guests were still there, having given up on all decorum and lounging
on chairs, couches, and on the floor ("We turned this room into
a gypsy campground"); a lecherous elderly composer snuck around
in the middle of the night kissing sleeping women
- curiously, they had hesitated to leave even though
the door was wide open - they were either trapped or held in for
days by an inexplicable and baffling force, a psychological barrier,
a lack of will, overwhelming lethargy, sheep-like behavior, or by
rueful acceptance or suggestion; the same kind of barrier prevented
outsiders from entering
- the guests' degeneration into animal-like behavior
(with quarreling, hysteria, and aggression); they became ravenously
hungry, slaughtered lambs that had wandered into the room, broke
through the brick walls to access drinking water in the pipes, and
burned the furniture; the stench of the bodies of two engaged lovers
Beatriz (Ofelia Montesco) and Eduardo (Xavier Massé) who had
suicidally killed themselves (by slitting their wrists) came from
their hidden location in a closet; eventually the desperate party
guests barbarically turned against their aristocrat host for feeling
self-entrapped and insulated
- in the film's mirroring twist ending, when they finally
exited the house, the guests entered a cathedral to attend a funeral
mass; again, they became confined as parishioners inside a Catholic
church (the clergy were trapped also) after the morning service;
there was a riot in the streets, and the military was summoned to
gun down the rioters
- the film's last image - a herd of sheep wandered toward
the church and entered in single file, as the church bell tolled
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Hosted Dinner Sequence
Guests "Trapped" in the Mexico City Estate
Riots in the Streets Outside Catholic Cathedral
Herd of Sheep
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