The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema, March 29-April 4
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
A French and Spanish co-production, That Obscure Object of Desire is of two minds, straddling the discrete worlds of man and woman, past and present, bourgeois and bohemian, domestic and urban. These poles are encapsulated by the fraught relationship between Mathieu and Conchita. Mathieu’s “desire” is portrayed by two actresses interchangeably, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina, who embody different temperaments in Mathieu’s imagination as he struggles to gain control over their character and his own emotions. Set against the backdrop of a terrorist insurgency, That Obscure Object of Desire portrays sexual desire as a literal battleground, where the stakes are high and the opposition is a shapeshifter. Celina Reynes (April 1, 6:45pm; April 5, 2:30pm, 9:45pm at the Metrograph’s “Buñuel in France”)