The double in Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire.

Personne ne voit les choses comme elles sont, mais comme ses desirs et son etat d'ame les lui font voir. (1)

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is the last movie that Luis Bunuel made. (2) It is a modern tale of love and deceit based on the French author Pierre Louys's book La Femme

et le pantin, (3) published in France in 1898. Jeremy Moore, who did an English translation of Louys's novel in 1999, writes that "The Woman and the Puppet [is] one of the greatest novels about obsessive love" (front material). The title of the novel indicates the dominance of the woman who, says Moore, "to be fatale requires the complicity of a male puppet" (back material). The title of the movie adaptation is more suggestive. Most critics agree that Bunuel's movie is a loose adaptation of Louys's novel whereas Bunuel thought that his movie was quite faithful to the novel and that it presented just a few interpolations, which, however, completely change the tone (Mon Dernier Soupir 309). The recourse to two different actresses to interpret the main female role will be the main interpolation that interests me here.

Bunuel named the movie after an expression from Pierre Louys's novel "pale objet du desir" (4) [sic] (Mon Dernier Soupir 309) but replaced "pale" by "obscure," thus adding mystery to the title. The word "obscure" next to "object" evokes a woman desired by a man but whose behavior remains incomprehensible to him. In addition, the equivalent of the word "obscure" in Spanish, that is oscuro, recalls the dark color of the woman's hair. Given Bunuel's Spanish origin, this choice of word is a judicious one that introduces objectivity and subjectivity in the lead female role.

Bunuel moved the action that Louys set exclusively in Seville during Carnival in February 1896 to Switzerland, France, and modern Spain in the seventies, where there prevailed a climate of insecurity, and he justifies his decision as follows:

   In addition to the theme of the impossibility
   of ever truly possessing a
   woman's body, the film insists upon
   maintaining that climate of insecurity
   and imminent disaster--an atmosphere
   we all recognize, because it is
   our own. (My Last Sigh 250)

Virginia Higginbotham compares this climate of terrorism to a sexual behavior in Christian culture found to be "violent and destructive" (Luis Bunuel 187). In addition, the travels in the movie create instability by carrying the viewer in many directions until the finale, when the couple disappears in a billowing cloud of smoke resulting from an explosion.