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Such an apologia may be offered by the confused and untalented artist as well as by the gifted one. The Milky Way, in fact, seems made of both varieties. Its shards and fragments remain in the retina long after the film has flashed by. Yet the angry whole is never equal to some of its parts—as if, like a doctor attending a plagued patient, Buñuel had been infected by what he was treating. "We have just enough religion to make us hate," said Swift, "but not enough to make us love one another." It is impossible to differentiate between the faults of the church and the faults of Buñuel.
After the completion of Belle de Jour in 1966, Luis Buñuel Delphically announced: "No more cinema for me—not in Spain, not in France, nowhere. Belle de Jour is my last film, semicolon."
Then, with scarcely a pause, he began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Buñuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, he started the opening battle in his long war against church and state. At the University of Madrid, he was an intimate of the revolutionary poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the genius-impostor Salvador Dali, with whom he shared two main interests, cinema and surrealism. Later, they made two pioneer films: The Andalusian Dog, notable for its explicit Freudian imagery and resolute non-meaning, and The Age of Gold, which contained frenzied images of a homicidal Christ figure. That succès de scandale severed the collaborators forever. "The film was a caricature of my ideas," complained Dali. "Catholicism was attacked in an obvious way, and quite without poetry."
In voluntary exile from Salvador Dali and Franco Spain, Buñuel resumed his career in Mexico, where he made his landmark in the Cinema of Cruelty, Los Olvidados, a fierce, searing lament for the Mexican poor. The cinema, he claimed, was "most reminiscent of the work of the mind during sleep"—and he kept on dreaming onscreen. Soon foreign film makers—and avant-garde American ones—began to imitate his trancelike style.
In 1960, word of Buñuel's enlarging reputation reached Generalissimo Franco, who invited Buñuel back to the old country to make a film, all expenses paid. Biting the handout that fed him, Buñuel created Viridiana, a movie with the inexorable rhythm of a time bomb. Vatican and Franco partisans needed only one look at the scene in which a nun is raped by a beggar; Viridiana was swiftly disowned.