Dry Martini

By RICHARD CORLISS

MY LAST SIGH by Luis Bunuel Translated by Abigail Israel Knopf; 256 pages; $15.95

He began his first film, Un Chien Andalou (1928), by walking onto a moon-flooded balcony and calmly slitting a young woman's eye. He began his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), by replacing his leading lady with two actresses who alternated scenes in the same role. For Luis Bunuel, the Spanish film maker who died this July at 83, conventions of content and form were mere pieties, best approached with a straight razor and a straight face. He had been, after all, one of the merry pranksters of surrealism, spiking cafe chat in bohemian Paris with cute conspiracies like sneaking a pornographic movie into a children's matinee. Back in the 1920s, the aesthetics of atrocity had worthy, powerful antagonists: the church, the government, the standard of fettered sexuality. Too soon though, the bad-taste revolution proved successful, and today the fractured visual logic of Un Chien Andalou can be found in Vogue graphics and on MTV. For the surrealists, the price of victory was high: acceptance by the hated bourgeoisie. Bunuel must have sighed in agreement when his friend Andre Breton noted that, alas, no one could be scandalized any more.

Bunuel's autobiography (written in collaboration with his longtime screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carriere) is thus in part the testament of an old man passing ironic judgment on a century that finally learned to accommodate him. If the book offers any shocks, they are of the boomerang variety: the iconoclast at twilight is in danger of becoming a moralist. He condemns "the proliferation of gutter words" in modern literature; he criticizes the excesses of his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War; he expresses relief in the waning of his sexual desire ("It's as if I've finally been relieved of a tyrannical burden"). It would seem that the only way the old surrealist can shock today's audience is by exposing himself as a discreetly charming gentleman.

Flashback to Bunuel's birthplace, the Spanish village of Calanda, where "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I."

The seven Bunuel children kept a menagerie of rats, monkeys, falcons, frogs and snakes as pets; Luis, the eldest, paraded through his upper-middle-class youth in religious vestments. In the early days, just about everyone he met was famous. Even before he made his first film at 28, Bunuel tells us, he had vanquished Heavyweight Champ Jack John son at arm wrestling; he had met Jorge Luis Borges, and found him tedious; Picasso had given him a painting (which he lost), and Lorca had written poems to him (which he quotes). Later, in Holly wood, Charlie Chaplin thoughtfully ar ranged an orgy for Bunuel, and in New York, the power of the Roman Catholic Church was flexed to remove him from an editing job at the Museum of Modern Art (where one of his tasks had been to cut Leni Riefenstahl's Nazified master piece. Triumph of the Will, to half its length for U.S. consumption). By the time Bunuel got around to directing his first fiction feature, he was 46.

The anecdotes and opinions keep caroming like talk-show badinage on Olympus. They meet the traditional challenge of autobiography: to speak entertainingly about others while revealing as little as possible about yourself. It is the pose that best suits a movie director, whose art is by nature voyeuristic rather than confession al. Of Jeanne, Bunuel's wife of almost 50 years, we learn only that he married her in Paris (forbidding her family to attend), had lunch with her, then took a train alone to Madrid. On his 32 films the Aragonian curmudgeon throws little light; neither Los Olvidados nor Viridiana nor Belle de Jour receives as much space as he lavishes on his recipe for the perfect dry martini. Perhaps he is not being coy when he avers that his real life was in dreams, so many of which surfaced as blunt, seductive imagery in films from L'Age d'Or to The Exterminating Angel.

His films are argument enough for his place in movie history. With My Last Sigh, Bunuel allows himself to be seen in another light: as that most engaging of con artists, the raconteur. Reading the memoir is like spending a long, lazy afternoon in his presence. His voice never rises above a murmur. A small smile engages his face as he recalls some long-ago provocation that today scandalizes no one. Now and then he dozes. On one such afternoon this summer, Bunuel nodded off into immortality.

One imagines that his last sigh was an "aahhh" as wry and reflective as this lovely book.

-- By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.