The Exterminating Angel

There's a moment in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, when Owen Wilson, traveling back in time to the Paris of the 1920s, meets a young Luis Bunuel. He suggests to the filmmaker that he make a movie in which guests a dinner party can't leave the room. "Why can't they leave?" Bunuel asks, perplexed. "They just can't," Wilson responds, though Bunuel doesn't understand.

Years later, in 1962, Bunuel, presumably not by Wilson's suggestion, made that film, The Exterminating Angel.

As I return to my ongoing series on Mexican culture, I turn to this classic by Bunuel, who was a Spaniard by birth but worked extensively in Mexico, exiled from his home country by the fascist Franco regime. The Exterminating Angel was made in Mexico after the film he made upon a return to Spain, Viridiana, ruffled Spanish government feathers.

The setting is a large mansion. A dinner party is being prepared, but the servants are itching to leave. They don't quite know why--later they are compared to rats leaving a sinking ship. Only the majordomo remains. After dinner, the guests lounge in the music room--it is close to dawn. At a certain point, after a guest plays the piano, it is clearly time to leave, but for some reason they can't, and instead simply lie down and go to sleep.

The following morning again they can't leave, and they realize something strange is going on. There is nothing physically compelling them to stay--it's just when they reach the threshold of the room they can't move forward.

Time goes on. They are out of water, so break open the wall so they can open a pipe. They are out of food, but eventually lambs (the sacrificial kind, surely) wander into the room, where they are set upon and devoured. Outside the house, police and the press wonder if the guests are still alive--they are also mysteriously unable to enter the premises.

Bunuel clearly was making a political statement, but the genius of the film, I think, is that it applies to almost any age. Perhaps this was a statement about Spain, or maybe there's something more elemental here. Surely it is relevant to this age, when we talk about the one percent, as these swells, starting out in formal dinner wear, are reduced to savages, fighting amongst themselves, their barbaric natures brought to the fore.

Most of the guests have certain distinctions. The calm, rational one is the doctor, (Augusto Benedicio), who also has the funniest lines. At one point a man raises the Masonic cry for help, but the only living thing in the house is a bear. "Unless the bear is a Mason, I don't think it will work," the doctor says. There is a young couple who are about to be married, an aging conductor who is married to a much younger woman (during the night, he smooches unsuspecting women), and a fat man with a cane, who blames it all on the host, Enrique Rambal, and thinks if the guests kill him, it will end the spell.

The most mysterious guest is a woman dubbed "The Valkyrie" (played by Bunuel veteran Silvia Panal), who is identified as a virgin. She is the one who figures out how to free themselves from their torment.

The Exterminating Angel is the kind of absurdist satire in the same vein as Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. It is a brilliant film.