Synopsis
The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté, 1974) is Luis Buñuel's sharp and deliberately broken French comedy — stream it online on iFILM. There is no single protagonist and no conventional plot: Buñuel links a chain of short episodes through chance encounters, dragging minor characters from one scene center stage in the next, then discarding them just as casually.
Dinner guests sit on toilets and retire to private booths to eat. Postcards of Paris landmarks are treated as obscene. A missing girl stands in full view while detectives file a missing-persons report around her. Each sequence runs on its own inverted logic, and none of them explain themselves. The cast includes Michel Piccoli, Monica Vitti, Jean Rochefort, and Jean-Claude Brialy — rotating in and out with the same dreamlike indifference the film treats all human business.
One of Buñuel's final works, made when he was 74, it is also one of his most caustic. If you want a film that treats bourgeois convention as a punchline and the narrative contract as optional, this is exactly the right 104 minutes. Watch The Phantom of Liberty online on iFILM.
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