During a journey to Paris, Mathieu Faber (Fernando Rey) tells a group of fellow train passengers of how he met a much younger woman, a very tempestuous relationship.

Luis Buñuel’s last film establishes early on that Faber hates that woman and we are just as eager as those passengers to find out what caused it. The decision to have Conchita played by two actresses was seemingly spontaneous, but an ingenious move; Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina’s different temperaments make the character more complex.

Terror lies in the background, like a symbol of the explosive eroticism of the story.

1977-France-Spain. 102 min. Color. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Novel: Pierre Louÿs (”The Woman and the Puppet”). Cast: Fernando Rey (Mathieu Faber), Carole Bouquet (Conchita Pérez), Ángela Molina (Conchita Pérez), Julien Bertheau, André Weber, Milena Vukotic. 

Trivia: Original title: Cet obscur objet du désir. The novel was filmed several times before, including as The Devil is a Woman (1935) and The Female (1958). Rey’s voice was dubbed by Michel Piccoli. Maria Schneider was first hired for a role. 

Last word: “In 1977, in Madrid, when I was in despair after a tempestuous argument with an actress who’d brought the shooting of That Obscure Object of Desire to a halt, the producer, Serge Silberman, decided to abandon the film altogether. The considerable financial loss was depressing us both until one evening, when we were drowning our sorrows in a bar, I suddenly had the idea (after two dry martinis) of using two actresses in the same role, a tactic that had never been tried before. Although I made the suggestion as a joke, Silberman loved it, and the film was saved.” (Buñuel, “My Last Sigh”)