General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Cet Obscur Objet du Désir

Cet obscur objet du désir (English title: That Obscure Object of Desire) is a 1977 French-Spanish comedy-drama directed by Luis Buñuel, his 32nd and final film, in which an aging French bourgeois recounts his obsessive, perpetually frustrated pursuit of a young woman named Conchita, played alternately by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina¹^•². The screenplay by Buñuel and his longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière adapts Pierre Louÿs's erotic novel La Femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898)³. It was released in France on 17 August 1977⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director / final film	Luis Buñuel's 32nd and last feature, made when he was 77 years old¹^•⁵
Countries / year	France and Spain, 1977²
French release	17 August 1977; CNC visa no. 46801, 105 min, 2,835 m of film⁴
Source	Pierre Louÿs's novel La Femme et le pantin (1898)³
Screenplay	Luis Buñuel with Jean-Claude Carrière²
Double casting	Conchita played by both Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina²
Lead actor	Fernando Rey as Mathieu Faber, his voice dubbed by Michel Piccoli⁶
Producer	Serge Silberman²

Spoilers

Plot and narrative structure

The film opens at a train station in Seville, where Mathieu Faber, a wealthy, well-groomed sexagenarian played by Fernando Rey, pours a pail of water over the head of a young woman about to board his train⁷^•⁵. Intrigued, the passengers in his compartment ask him to explain himself, and the rest of the film is his account of his relationship with Conchita⁵.

Mathieu first meets Conchita when she is employed in his household; when he summons her to his room to make advances, she quits her post the same evening⁸. Chance keeps placing her in his path across several European cities, but each time he believes he has reached his goal she slips away, provoking him while letting him support her financially, and giving herself to other men⁹. The Larousse film dictionary summarizes the dynamic as a game played on three levels: Conchita's game with Mathieu, Mathieu's game with his listeners, and the filmmaker's game with the spectator⁹.

The love story runs against a background of terrorist bombings and news items that repeatedly interrupt the narrative¹⁰. Jean-François Rauger, film critic at Le Monde, describes the film as "an authentically surrealist opera of sexual frustration," in which the story becomes a via crucis endured by a man who watches the object of his desire escape¹⁰.

The two Conchitas

The film's best-known device is that Conchita is played by two physically dissimilar actresses who alternate in the role: Carole Bouquet, a sophisticated French beauty, and Ángela Molina, a Spanish coquette³. The role was initially planned for Maria Schneider, who left the production¹⁰.

Buñuel himself gave a prosaic account of the decision in his memoir Mon dernier soupir (My Last Sigh): in 1977 in Madrid, after a tempestuous argument with an actress that brought shooting to a halt, producer Serge Silberman decided to abandon the film; that evening, in a bar, Buñuel proposed using two actresses in the same role, first as a joke, and Silberman embraced the idea and the film was saved⁶. According to the online film journal Senses of Cinema, Buñuel and Carrière had in fact flirted with the idea of two actresses while working on the script, dismissed it, and returned to it only after Schneider's departure¹¹. Critics have read the doubling in several ways: as an image of a woman's changeable, unreadable character, as a statement that desire has no fixed object, or as a theatrical artifice left deliberately unexplained⁹^•¹².

Production and place in Buñuel's career

The film was produced by Serge Silberman through Greenwich Film Productions (Paris), Les Films Galaxie, and In Cine (Madrid), with Edmond Richard as director of photography, Pierre Guffroy as production designer, and Hélène Plemiannikov as editor²^•¹¹. The music combines fragments of Wagner's Die Walküre with flamenco¹³.

Buñuel's career ran from Un chien andalou in 1929 to this film in 1977, nearly fifty years¹⁴. Cet obscur objet du désir closes the final French period of his career, made with the team of Silberman and Carrière that had also produced Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, Belle de jour, La Voie lactée, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, and Le Fantôme de la liberté¹⁵. The Cinémathèque française notes that it came fifty years after Un chien andalou, as a final surrealist gesture².

The adaptation has a long screen history. Louÿs's novel had already been filmed by Jacques de Baroncelli in 1929, by Josef von Sternberg as The Devil Is a Woman (1935), and by Julien Duvivier in 1959 with Brigitte Bardot³^•¹¹^•¹⁶. The film's title itself echoes a phrase from the novel¹⁷.

Release and reception

After the French release on 17 August 1977, the film opened in Spain on 21 September 1977 and rolled out through Europe, reaching the United Kingdom in 1978 and Portugal in 1981⁴^•¹⁸. The CNC record classifies it "Tous publics" (suitable for all audiences)⁴.

Critics have treated the film as a summation of Buñuel's themes. Dave Kehr called it "another masterpiece in this 1977 feature, his final film," drawn with what he described as a perfectly clear, impregnable style¹⁹. A MUBI-cited review saw the film as a summation of the director's preoccupation with the connection between sex and violence, with terrorism surfacing in moral, social, and political forms alongside the sexual games¹⁹. The Criterion Collection released it on Blu-ray as spine #143, with a 2017 documentary, Lady Doubles, featuring Bouquet and Molina discussing the shared role³. Running times reported by archives differ slightly: the CNC lists 105 minutes, the BFI 103, and Criterion 104⁴^•²⁰^•³.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026