Buñuel, the standard-bearer of Dadaism, is a veritable "talent". He is good at capturing the irrational state of social people and telling wonderful stories that are absurd and thought-provoking on the screen.
After the baptism of silent films, sound films are naturally familiar, but the seemingly straight-forward dialogue sets make the audience carry out an unreasonable screen imprisonment. The film tells the story of a group of people from the upper class who were invited by a couple to their home for dinner after enjoying the opera. Rested indoors. The next day, everyone was puzzled and could not think of any way out of their predicament. They were still socializing in the house. As time went on, everyone lost patience and finally went crazy. After a few days, they recalled and repeated the beginning of it all together, finally breaking the "curse" and leaving the house. But the strange things did not end, and more people were trapped in the church.
The film mainly shows in detail the psychological and behavioral state of this group of people trapped in the house. On the one hand, it reveals the common disguise of people, people hide their desires, talk about people in front of people, and talk nonsense behind them. On the other hand, the sheep and bears in the film allude to the animal nature of human beings, they want to eat when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty, and also satisfy their sexual needs. It can be said that this film vividly carried out "vivisection" of people in society.
What I am more interested in is that in the process of watching the movie, due to the long-term performance of this closed space, the audience seems to be locked in as well. While watching the changes in the psychology and behavior of this group of people, the audience is also invisible. While "suffering", Buñuel's "experiment" successfully pulled the audience in, and the occasional exterior scenes in the middle seemed to be kind to let the audience breathe.
At the end of the film, after a scene of street riots, people repeat the process of losing themselves in the church, suggesting the corresponding relationship between the two metaphors: the essence of society is madness, but the normality is hypocritical lies and patience.
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