The Milky Way

THE MILKY WAY   ***

Luis Buñuel

1969

IDEA:  On the famous Way of St. James pilgrimage route, two vagrants encounter a panoply of characters and incidents from ecclesiastical history.

BLURB:  A heretical theological seminar by way of picaresque, The Milky Way contains all the irreverent religious commentary one expects from Luis Buñuel. Here, he uses the episodic literary format to take aim at the contradictions and hypocrisies of Catholicism, populating the titular pilgrim’s route with figures from centuries’ worth of Christian history and iconography. The encounters between these figures and a pair of vagabond protagonists form the film’s loosey-goosey structure, through which Buñuel playfully dramatizes and skewers the absurdities of a variety of Christian dogmas. Although it’s chockablock with symbolism and allusions, The Milky Way is admirably straightforward. Each vignette on its winding road trip stages a debate about the nature and calculus of faith, especially with regard to Catholic tenets, in which one or many characters pronounces a belief that is then challenged by others or delivered in such a way that its logic is implicitly called into question. Buñuel depicts the resulting opprobrium, rhetorical confusion, and defensive certitude with a jauntiness that lends everything sardonic bite. As always, his ire is not directed at the idea of religion or piety as at the institutions built around them, and all the ways their absolutist strictures have historically functioned to keep people in line. Much of the gleeful iconoclasm and ironic sermonizing does grow repetitive after a while, but Buñuel tempers his impudence with a poignant recognition: that the true believer is one who embraces more than a single possibility.