Review of The Milky Way

This is my favorite of all the films I've seen by Louis Bunuel. One of his least compromising films, it somehow manages to be simultaneously one of his most entertaining. An ambitious cine-essay on the history of heresy within Catholicism, it's intellectual ambition in no way get in the way of its ability to affect the viewer as a work of cinema. Indeed, it might be the most cinematic film in Bunuel's oeuvre. The cinematography by Christian Matras (of Grand Illusion fame) is uncharacteristically beautiful for a Bunuel film, and although this is allegory at it's most ambitious, it is also a film about life on the road. This was a late career movie for Bunuel, and he was already in his late 60s when he made it. But few of his films seem to me to be possessed by such youthful rigor. Perhaps Bunuel, working in France at the time, was inspired by the rebellious whiper-snapper directors of the then still new French New Wave, particularly Godard, whose Weekend this film sometimes resembles. The final, particularly blasphemous scenes present Christ not as a unifier but a figure whose words, and they are taken directly from the Gospels, are meant to create a vicious anarchy of interpretation.