I've seen this film three times. I saw it once when I borrowed it from the library. Now I watched it twice more when I rented it off of Amazon.com. It is a very good film. It won the Oscar for best Foreign Language the year it was released. The film is hard to classify in terms of a genre, but it ranges from comedy to drama, politics to romance.
The film settles on the characters trying to have dinner or lunch which they are always prevented from doing. The scene in the Café shows the running gag in the film. First the ladies ask for Coffee, then Tea, and finally water, which doesn't come in time. While they are trying to get something to drink an army officer come over and tells them about his life. It is an interesting, surreal sequence that Bunuel is so good at. And it makes the film excellent. It blends dream and reality, so much that by the end you don't know whether what's going on is a dream or reality. A very surrealist film. Very entertaining. It is probably Bunuel's best film. And of course the women are all very pretty. I especially like Stephane Audran's cheekbones. I couldn't stop looking at her. She was so mesmerizing.
The film ends ambiguously with the group walking down a country road to where? I guess it is left up to the viewer to speculate where they are going. Perhaps they are lost? Or is it Bunuel torturing his characters. They must walk to an undetermined destination constantly searching for a place to eat. I could hardly say a bad thing about this film. It was well shot. The acting was good. The writing was creative and not too predictable. And of course Bunuel was a master at direction. Great film!
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