Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.
I’m never sure what I’m going to get when I sign myself up for a film directed by Luis Bunuel. Sometimes I really like his work a lot. At other times, I wonder why I bother. I’d heard a lot good about El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), but once bitten and all of that. There are too many Bunuel films that I genuinely don’t like at all that I’m going to be suspicious of any of them all the way through. What I’ve found is that I tend to like his work a lot more when, absurd or not, there’s a narrative through-line. Things can be absurd and I’m okay with it; it’s when they don’t make sense that I get bothered.
El Angel Exterminador, while absurd in the extreme, has an internally consistent narrative. A group of people go to a dinner party at the home of a man named Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal). Everything goes well, but for some reason, the servants suddenly find reasons to be away from the house. In the middle of the party all of them except the main butler (Claudio Brook) wander off suddenly with pressing appointments. The party goes off, and eventually everyone retires to the parlor where one of the guests plays the piano.
