The Exterminating Angel (1962) is the Luis Buñuel surrealist black comedy about Mexican socialites who find they can't leave the conservatory room after a party. This is a film I'd heard about many years ago and didn't know much about, but I knew that Bunuel had done Un Chien Andalou with loopy artist Salvador Dali and had also directed Belle de Jour. Someone else on these forums also recently mentioned The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, a kind of inversion of Exterminating Angel where socialites keep failing to sit down to a meal.
I found the film fairly fascinating (watch it here), altho not particularly dramatic or funny. But it was much more engaging than, say, Synecdoche, New York, which I found dull and obtuse despite liking other Charlie Kaufman surrealist fantasies, especially Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The film opens on a mansion on Providence Street, which suggests that Bunuel has a bone to pick with religion, and he's not shy.
The socialites enter the house as the servants make hollow excuses to leave early. Things get weird quickly, with the guests making two nearly identical entrances (one of these was deleted in the cut I saw on Turner Classic Movies but not in the link above) and the host awkwardly repeating his toast. The talk is gossipy and often ugly.
But it's only after the guest of honor plays a piano piece in the conservatory that the guests find that, despite the late hour, they can't bring themselves to leave. Awkwardly for the hosts, they make themselves comfortable on the furniture....
As the night turns into days, the socialites become desperate. Outside, the authorities are just as unable to bring themselves to enter the house as the socialites are to leave the conservatory. I won't reveal the stranger turns of events, but I will say that most of what the guests do is very sensible and even clever—except the most sensible thing of all: simply leaving.
The story plays a bit like a disaster film (and in fact seems to have strongly inspired The Mist) but is clearly an allegory of the way the upper class (the upwardly aspiring butler is the only servant in the room) can become trapped in their lives. It's not, in my opinion, a whole lot deeper than that. (The title is taken from an unproduced play and isn't a direct reference to anything.)
By the end, the guests prove to be capable of monstrous actions, but one who is perhaps more innocent than the rest comes up with simple solution that harkens back to some of the early scenes. But the story isn't over, for a very similar event then seems to happen in a church nearby a few days later, suggesting that religion is just entrapping as society life.
Bunuel clearly had a beef with the bourgeoisie and religion—superstition is rejected, and a doctor is the voice of reason thruout. And the film suggests they trap us in meaningless, repetitious lives that can spur us to do awful things when we all have the power to stop it at any time. Fortunately, the movie is more than just that message. While the dialog is not scintillating and the characters are not particularly memorable (perhaps part of the problem of telling a story about vapid people), the events are fairly fascinating and make the movie worth watching.
But I can't help thinking that Monty Python would have hit this out of the park.
