General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

That Obscure Object of Desire

That Obscure Object of Desire (French: Cet obscur objet du désir) is a 1977 comedy-drama directed by Luis Buñuel, his final film, in which a wealthy middle-aged Frenchman, Mathieu, recounts his obsessive, unconsummated pursuit of a young Spanish woman, Conchita, who is played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, alternating in the same role.¹^•² A French-Spanish production released in France on 17 August 1977, it was hailed on release as a triumphant swan song for the 77-year-old Buñuel and has remained among his most discussed works.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and status	Luis Buñuel's final film, completed in 1977; he died in Mexico in 1983¹^•⁵
Source	Pierre Louÿs' 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet, previously filmed by Josef von Sternberg (1935) and Julien Duvivier (1959)¹
Cast	Fernando Rey as Mathieu; Conchita played alternately by Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina²
Screenplay and production	Written by Buñuel with his regular screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière; produced by Serge Silberman¹^•⁶
Release	France, 17 August 1977; 105 minutes per the CNC visa³
Honors	Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (1978); Los Angeles Film Critics Association Best Foreign Language Film (1977); National Board of Review Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film (1978)⁷
Critical standing	Metascore 84, "Universal Acclaim"; 97% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer⁸^•²

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens with Mathieu (Fernando Rey) dumping a bucket of water over a beautiful young woman from the window of a train compartment, then regaling his fellow passengers with the story of his dysfunctional relationship with her, a fiery young flamenco dancer named Conchita.² What follows is a series of amorous encounters in which Conchita arouses his desire but denies him sexual satisfaction, moving through cycles of approach, promise, refusal, flight, and return.⁹^•¹⁰ Mathieu pursues her with money as well as attention, giving funds repeatedly and generously to Conchita and her mother, and at one point says in the film that she could get much more money from him than he has given.¹¹

The account ends back in the compartment, where Conchita appears on the train and returns the bucket of water in kind, answering the opening gesture by the one person present who could contradict the story.¹⁰ When the train reaches Paris, the story steps off it: inside an arcade, a woman behind a shop window repairs a lace garment stained with blood, an explosion occurs, and the picture closes, releasing in a single moment the violence held back across the entire narrative.¹⁰

A thread of terrorism and political violence runs through the narrative, with sacks carried by figures in the background that may or may not hide bombs. Critics have read these recurring objects, along with the animals that pass through the film and the money endlessly exchanged, as symbols that seem to empty themselves of meaning the more they recur.¹²

The two actresses

The film's most remarked-upon device is the alternation of Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina as Conchita, with no marking of the identity shift: just when Mathieu has all but seduced one Conchita, the other emerges from the dressing room.²^•¹³ Buñuel and Carrière originally flirted with the idea of casting two actresses while working on the script, dismissed it, and proceeded to casting looking for just one actress before returning to the device.¹ In his memoir My Last Breath, Buñuel confirmed the film's key duality, writing that in addition to the theme of the impossibility of truly possessing a woman's body, the film insists on maintaining a climate of insecurity and imminent disaster, an atmosphere everyone recognizes because it is our own.¹ True to his usual wariness toward acclaim, Buñuel afterwards remarked that, looking back, the device struck him as self-evident, the simplest way to portray a desired object that cannot be pinned down.⁴

Roger Ebert, the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, gave the film four stars and called the double casting Buñuel's most obvious touch and perhaps his best, dramatizing Conchita's tantalizing elusiveness; in his reading, Conchita is not simply denying herself to the man who loves her but teaching him a lesson about his own need for a woman who would be always unattainable.¹³ The device has since been treated as the whole point of the movie rather than a stunt born of necessity, and it anticipates later films such as David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001), in which Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring are cast as potentially the same character across the film's two halves.⁴

Source and place in Buñuel's career

The screenplay adapts Pierre Louÿs' 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet, which Josef von Sternberg had already filmed in 1935 as The Devil is a Woman and Julien Duvivier in 1959.¹^•⁹ Buñuel made the film in Europe, essentially in France, with Carrière and the producer Serge Silberman, the team behind his late critical and commercial successes Belle de jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), the latter an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film.⁵ The film was shot in French, with some scenes in Spanish, and its pre-existing score draws on Richard Wagner's Die Walküre.¹⁴^•⁶ It premiered in the official section of the 25th San Sebastián Festival in 1977.¹⁵

Reception and interpretation

Critical response has been strongly positive and durable. The film holds a Metascore of 84, labeled "Universal Acclaim," with reviews ranging from a 60 (J. Hoberman in the Village Voice calling it an elaborate exercise in frustration) to 100s from the Christian Science Monitor and Entertainment Weekly.⁸ Rotten Tomatoes reports a 97% Tomatometer from 34 reviews, with a critics' consensus describing the film as a frequently unsettling treatise on the quixotic nature of lust and love.² Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote that the special quality of Buñuel's late storyteller's style is that there are no layers, nothing hidden, and that this is what makes it so serene.²

Interpretation has remained varied. The film has been claimed by both feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, and the debates it provoked when it appeared remain unresolved: why two actresses were used, whose picture it is (the man's version of events or the film's critique of it), what link the terrorists have to the love story, what the sack signifies, and what the final explosion brings to a close.¹⁰ By presenting desire as inherently unfulfillable and its object as something built by cinema rather than a real person, the film foreshadows the psychoanalytic film theory that emerged fully formed during the 1980s.⁴ Jean-Pierre Oudart, an influential theorist of Cahiers du cinéma in the 1960s and 1970s working from Lacanian thought, was struck by a film so determinedly void of the usual cinematic games designed to lure and seduce a target audience.¹² Among Buñuel's late films it is often ranked below The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Viridiana in some critics' estimations, but it stands as the most single-minded of them: one desire, one man's account of it, and one stroke of casting that makes the account show what it hides.¹⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026