Cinema: Host of Troubles

The Exterminating Angel. In a vast town house, a group of Mexico’s beautiful people attend a formal dinner party. Clacking across marble floors, exchanging big smiles and small talk, they radiate the feeling that throughout their hermetically sealed world, all is well.

But below stairs, all is ill. One by one the servants quit the mansion in fear of something they never name. Only the butler is left to serve the shambles of a meal. Midnight comes and goes, but no guest makes a move to leave. At 4 a.m., before the horrified host, the guests loosen their jackets, gowns and coiffures and abruptly bivouac on the floor. The next morning they discover that somehow they cannot leave the room. Days go by. Their amusement becomes annoyance, then terror. Like miners entombed in a cave-in, they first cry out, then slowly sink into apathy. An old man dies; a young couple commit suicide. Occasionally someone screams to break the clamorous silence.

Finally, a group decides to kill the host and offer him as a sacrificial victim to the gods. Then, swiftly as it arrived, the mysterious ban is lifted. Joyously the prisoners pour out the door and blink at the unfamiliar sun. Days later, to commemorate their escape, the survivors reassemble to celebrate a solemn Te Deum Mass in gratitude for their rescue. As the ritual ends, they head for the church doors—and find that suddenly they are unable to leave.

Director Luis Bunuel, who once made a film with Salvador Dali showing an eyeball being shaved, again indulges his penchant for cinematic surrealism and elliptical dialogue. When a window breaks, a guest scoffs, “It’s just a passing Jew.” A woman carries chicken feet and feathers in her purse. A man shaves his leg with an electric razor. A hand without an owner fingers its way across the room. Throughout, Bunuel continues his career-long attack on church and stately. One woman sneers, “I think the lower classes are less sensitive to pain.” Another begs for a washable rubber madonna from Lourdes.

Unfortunately, like his targets, Bunuel has aged poorly. His images no longer shock, his attacks, in the era of black humor, seem peculiarly tame and tepid. Manifestly, he intended Angel to fly on several levels. It could be a metaphor of proliferating fascism, as in Camus’ The Plague. Or it could be a restatement of the theme of No Exit, Sartre’s trapped-in-a-room drama: hell is other people.

Viewers are less likely to identify with either interpretation than with the film’s initial dramatic problem: hardly a person lives who has not, at one time or another, had a hell of a time getting his guests to go home.