Some movies by Luis Buñuel are at first sight an incongruous mixture of realistic, surrealistic, (anti)religious, sexual and dream elements. However, in his carefully concocted screenplays, no text, no image, no character, no sequence doesn't have a meaning, not always a logical one, but at least an associative one. Hereafter, a modest contribution to the many interpretations already published about 'The Exterminating Angel'. We should not forget that the screenplay of this movie is based on an unfinished play by José Bergamin, a catholic and Marxist.In 'Providence street' a group of upper class people (pars pro toto) gets trapped in a house after a dinner party given by the soprano Lucia after her performance as 'Lucia', the main role in the opera 'Lucia di Lammermoor' by G. Donizetti. The libretto of the opera, based on a novel by Walter Scott, contains a bad (forced) marriage, a mad scene, a ghost and a suicide, all elements used in the movie. Before the dinner party began, all members of the underclass (the servants) had left the house for all kinds of reasons, except the majordomo ('a clown'). At night, the guests don't want to leave the house and prefer to stay inside it during the whole night. In the morning, they find out that they are trapped inside. A journey into 'the disintegration of human dignity' begins. Without their servants, the upper class members are not capable of organizing a normal way of life. Their mansion doesn't become a paradise, despite the playing of a piano piece by Pietro Domenico 'Paradisi' and despite a cabalistic ritual, amulets (chicken feet) or even a Masonic cry. The inhabitants are confronted with other living 'symbols' inside the house: a bear (violence) and sheep (victims). The latter will be slaughtered in order to save the party members from starvation.The spell is broken when a party member can reconstruct the past, the beginning of the ordeal. They can turn the time back and leave their prison. Their liberation is celebrated with a 'Te Deum' mass. When they come out of the church, they see another spectacle: common people are shot down by their long arm, the police. The plebs is offering itself up to the existing powers like sheep, of which a long row enters the church in a holy procession. The opportunity of a power grab has been missed. The angel is still exterminating the underclasses.

THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL is a surrealist drama about a high class as social parasites, which are gathered in one place.After a visit to an opera, a group of fashionable people from high society has gathered at a party in a villa of a respected gentleman and his wife. However, their servants unaccountably leave their posts. The guests enjoy a luxurious and somewhat strange party. They notice, after dinner, that's all the servants gone, and that they can not get out of a music salon, even though all the doors and windows are open. The guests consume what little drinks and food are left from the previous night's party. Days pass, and their situation is complicated. They become hungry, thirsty, sick and hysterical...Mr. Buñuel has offered a strange display of human degradation, which has brought depression and hostility in a civil conflict. He has, through a surreal approach, manipulated with the characters, pulling out all the best and worst characteristics from them. An isolation is a mystery in this film. However, an isolation is a form of decision in the real world.Mr. Buñuel has showed us one of the characters of a privileged society, which is symbolically lost in its sole discretion. The story is a quite nervous and depressed, the pace is engrossing and transitions are explosive.Director's focus is on his people and situations in the society to which he belongs. This exceeds a surreal character and satire in this film.The acting is very good. I would mention Silvia Pinal (Leticia), as the voice of reason and realization.This is an unusual and frustrating game, which examines the patient with the audience.

A Bruñuel school's invitation is always becoming for any cinephile's reservoir, currently this film marks my fourth entrance into his territory after the lesser approachable THE MILKY WAY (1969, 6/10), THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL is an outstanding surrealism allegory, Bruñuel maneuvers a sleight of hand with sheer simplicity, the entire story is predominantly crammed in a living room of a regal mansion, the owners Lucía (Gallardo) and Edmundo (Rambal) host a dinner party for 20 middle-class guests. Bizarrely the party never ends, all of them, with the steward Julio (Brook) are incarcerated in the living room, whoever intends to get out of the room, will involuntarily alter his mind to stay, meanwhile for the people outside, the same mysteriously inexplicable force hedges them from entering too. Trapped in this claustrophobic space, the coexistence turns sour with time ruthless consuming the sustenance, the energy and the etiquette, simultaneously squabbles, vituperation, oneiric hallucinations, suicidal tendency and roughhousing all come to the fore (Bruñuel could go to extreme with cannibalism but he chose to refrain), the procedure of everyone takes off their facade and betrays their true self is excruciatingly riveting, the film could scale new heights as a superb probing essay on human nature if Bruñuel cared to exhume deeper to each character's meaty back-story (the fraternal hint, the flirtatious lady with terminal cancer, the undercurrent of adultery between the hostess and the Colonel, a votive trip to Lordes, the before/after reaction of taking the ulcer pills, not to mention the "La Valkiria" Leticia played by the first-billed Silvia Pinal, there are a slew of untold scandals are in need of elaboration). Instead the upshot is executed with a much murkier distinction, conspicuously they are all pawns in Bruñuel's storybook, it is rather an exacting task to distinguish all the different roles from a first-viewing, if only Robert Altman would do a remake, and expunge the political metaphor of the ending, then it would be transformed into a highly-watchable character analysis and an incisive farce with eye-dropping theatrical showpieces.Of course Bruñuel's mastery is omnipresent in the film, the superimposition shot of a clear sky upon a facial portrait, the outlandish amalgam of lambs and a baby bear, and the creative approach to offer a vent to let them out (a Paradisi's sonata is the turning point), until the climax, we all realize it is just a trial run, and the denouement is a dual indictment on undiscerning religious belief and the political status quo at then, pepped up with a palpable feeling of hopelessness. Also the slap to the bourgeois is loud and clear since the film's opening, it is the servants who are sentient of the pending uncanniness, and urge to leave the house as soon as possible, only the obtuse are being entrapped by the almighty trickster. Then what happens to the hoi polloi in the church? The purge is more generic or we should merely stop over-interpretation? Anyway who needs a concrete answer as long as Bruñuel is concerned.

Perhaps I was born too late to appreciate this film; perhaps I was born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. In 1962 (three years before I was born), this may well have been scintillating, cutting-edge film making. By 2012 standards, "The Exterminating Angel" holds up only as a period piece. It represents its era well much the same way George Melies' "A Trip to the Moon" represents its era. I selected the Melies film for comparison because it is widely regarded as a watershed achievement for 1902. I can think of no other reason why "The Exterminating Angel" should be heaped with such praise by modern audiences - because it shaped what followed it. That alone does not make it a great film.Other better and more enjoyable watershed films include "Lost Horizon," "Metropolis," "Citizen Kane," "2001," "Nosferatu," and "Casablanca." "The Exterminating Angel" is an unfinished thought, too conventional to be considered much of an experiment; it wants to be a thought-provoking message movie, but it doesn't have anything to say and the only thought it provoked for me was "how much longer until I begin to care about what's happening?" Is "The Exterminating Angel" a bad movie? No, but nor does it represent the best that cinema has to offer and deserve to populate so many the top 50 or top 100 lists.My review may very well be derided for being too narrow-minded, ethnocentric, and corrupted by CGI. Trying to learn about the history of film, I looked forward to "The Exterminating Angel" and was more than willing to view it in its own terms. Days after watching this film, however, I still can't shake my conclusion that, even this agonizingly overlong movie was trimmed by three-quarters, the storyline and resulting tele-play wouldn't even make a memorable Twilight Zone episode. Hoping to see a bit of film history, I could find little reason to care about the characters or their plight, its causes and resolution. The film seemed less like a movie than an exercise. In what I have no idea.