Monday, April 18, 2022

L'Age d'Or (1930)


IMDb plot summary: A surrealist tale of a man and a woman who are passionately in love with each other, but their attempts to consummate that passion are constantly thwarted by their families, the Church, and bourgeois society.
Directed by Luis Buñuel. Starring Gaston Modot, Lya Lys, and Caridad de Laberdesque.

L'Age d'Or is a Luis Bunuel film, which means it's surrealist and experimental and avant-garde, which is definitely not my vibe. There are definitely some moments of narrative throughout, but mostly it's sort of a visual artistic interpretation of the evils of excess and greed and abundance. Unlike some other Bunuel films, there aren't really any images here that held onto me past the credits rolling. They all definitely contributed to a atmospheric sense of decadence but none of them made a distinct mark on me. I wonder sometimes if "excesses of the wealthy" is a theme that just doesn't sit right with me. There are a host of films in classic cinema that deal with this theme, and many of them are light on narrative, and I don't know whether it's that lack of narrative or the theme itself that fails to connect with me on any level. Regardless, this is an important film, it's one that I'm glad to have seen for my own film literacy, but it's not one that I particularly cared for and it's not one that I could see ever re-visiting.

How it entered my Flickchart:
L'age d'Or < Gas Food Lodging
L'age d'Or > Big Fat Liar
L'age d'Or < Dirty Dancing
L'age d'Or < The White Ribbon
L'age d'Or < A Month by the Lake
L'age d'Or < What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
L'age d'Or > CQ
L'age d'Or > A Civil Action
L'age d'Or < Susannah of the Mounties
L'age d'Or < Pepito and the Magic Lamp
L'age d'Or < Warm Bodies
L'age d'Or < Rebel Without a Cause
Final spot: #2627 out of 3558, or 26%.

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