Hats off, definitely, to Kino Video, for not caring less about the bottom line and releasing *L'Age d'Or* on DVD for the cineaste's consumption. (The picture still looks awful, but I doubt it would've looked much better even if Criterion had bothered with it -- this movie, after all, was nearly destroyed forever in 1930!) The above-mentioned cineastes and other devotees of Luis Bunuel will, of course, snap this DVD up; but what can *L'Age d'Or* offer to the merely curious or to those who are willing to broaden their cultural intake? Hilarity, primarily: the movie, almost incredibly, still generates at least a half-dozen belly laughs by presenting vignettes that are sublimely absurd and bracingly offensive. Bunuel and Salvador Dali take their Surrealist picks and shovels and dig into the audience's nasty, wiping-boogers-on-the-walls subconsciousness in a manner that has hardly been imitated, let alone bettered. (Well, Ken Russell tried it, but his movies are boorish.) *L'Age d'Or* doesn't tell a story so much as it blasts the trendy Fascism in Europe at the time it was made. At the outset, we have to endure Bunuel's obligatory fascination with bugs -- in this particular case, scorpions, which serve as a convenient symbol for human beings yadda yadda yadda. But the movie really gets going when artist Max Ernst leads a derelict platoon of warriors straight out of Sir John Falstaff's army on a mission to wipe out a bunch of bishops. Cinema has rarely shown futility and sheer tiredness in such a funny way.

But, as you'd might expect from a pair of demented Surrealists, the movie veers off toward a whole series of non sequiturs. *L'Age d'Or* eventually decides to be about repressed sexuality: we're introduced to a pair of lust-maddened lovers, writhing and drooling all over each other in the dust during some sort of civic ceremony purporting to open a new "golden age". The police and other good "bourgeoisie" separate the horny pair: the Man (Gaston Modot, who film snobs will recognize as the jealous gamekeeper in Renoir's *Rules of the Game*) gets dragged off to modern-day Rome, but he easily eludes his captors and winds up at a fancy party of a decadent Duke who happens to be the father of the object of his lust. He reunites with the Woman, but not before slapping the hell out of her mother, who has made the unforgivable mistake of accidentally spilling some liqueur on his coat sleeve. . . .

Look -- one can't "summarize the plot" of this madness; one can only mention his or her favorite moments. My personal favorite: when a father blows his own annoying kid away with a hunting rifle. Then, after the kid's obviously dead, he shoots the poor little bugger again, and the force of the bullet shoves the body out of the camera's frame. What can I say -- I find this sort of thing funny. Most will not, undoubtedly. But I think everyone can appreciate the fevered eroticism on display when the Man and the Woman reunite in the Duke's garden. When they're not sucking on each other's fingers (jamming their hands into each other's mouths as if their mouths were jelly jars), they're sucking on the toes of an expressionless marble statue (the Bunuelian obsession with feet was life-long). This is all weird and funny, but it does tie in with Bunuel's original point, which is that we're as driven by appetites as your average scorpion. Fidelity is something we force on ourselves. Bunuel and Dali, playing with symbols, are free to make their characters free of constraint.

Despite the anything-goes ethos of the film, it's still hard for modern audiences to understand why it caused such a stir 75 years ago. The images are startling, discreetly pornographic even, but hardly beyond the pale. But the movie was banned within weeks, and Bunuel was virtually exiled to Mexico in the aftermath. (Dali, a cunning survivor, disavowed the film soon after its release.) Can it be that Bunuel and Dali brought all this trouble on themselves simply by making fun of rich people and bourgeois conventions? The answer is apparently Yes. No doubt, the cretins who run the current government in the United States would've empathized with those long-ago Fascist arbiters of good taste who attempted to destroy this movie forever. After all, who's richer or more bourgeois than the Bush Administration?

Yeah -- as long as religious hypocrites exist, there shall always be a place for Bunuel's *L'Age d'Or*, all right. 8 stars out of 10.