We as people in love tend to go after the unavailable, that which tempts us but manages to remain maddeningly out of reach, or just within the spectrum of possibility but vanishing at the last crucial moment. Love is strange, yet we pursue it like the blind leading the blind, moving around in circles, no beginning, no end, and with an increasing sense of futility.<br /><br />Mathieu is one of those men. He's been sent over the edge by the promise of love and has publicly humiliated a young woman at a train station with a bucket of water as she attempts to board the train he's on. Passengers sharing his booth react in horror, but he has his own story to tell. The more he delves into it the less it seems to be about love and the more it looks like an obsession-fixation with the impossible: a woman, the very same one he's splashed with the bucket of water, named Conchita, arresting and bewitching, but one who would make a tease seem innocent by comparison.<br /><br />Conchita is a horror -- a woman ugly on the inside as she is alluring on the outside. She brings only misery to Mathieu, but he can't seem to get rid of her, and she inexplicably returns to him over and over again to repeat a cycle of love-hate that slowly eats away at him. One moment she's kittenish, the next, cold. Every time they're about to reach the moment of sexual communion something happens, or she announces she's a virgin as she wears an impenetrable chastity corset to which she has the key. She's not above gifts... or using her male companions to also rob Mathieu of specific amounts of money. And on top of that, a soothsayer has the nerve to tell him that he is the one who treats a young woman badly and as an offrend for her services, has him give some coins to a young mother who is carrying a tiny pig in her arms like it were a baby.<br /><br />Still, the question remains, what does she want with Mathieu? She could be a latter-day Mildred Rogers, leeching away at the man she despises while manipulating him into a frenzy. She obviously knows her own sexual power: at one moment she lays on top of Mathieu, naked, teasing him with words and promises as he can only caress her and wish that one day she will relent and literally, let him in.<br /><br />Peppered throughout the story are allusions to terrorist attacks on the city where Mathieu lives. While it may just seem a little extra seasoning added to color the story, with Bunuel there is no casualty, and inexorably, like in THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, violence comes and literally invades the domestic war that both Conchita and Mathieu are engaged in.<br /><br />Bunuel's last film is one of the least Surrealistic in nature as well as one of the most. It's a contradiction, like Conchita herself is a contradiction of personalities contained within one woman. Somehow people who saw this movie were under the assumption, before entering the story, that this would be a more Hitchcockian story like VERTIGO, but in having both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina swap entrances and exits, he manages to convey the most cerebral of his incursions into Surrealism. A woman who is really two who is the embodiment of repulsion and desire even when she herself is a prisoner of her own need for teasing -- what better way to have two woman play one? While the cool, reserved, and near frigid Bouquet balances one side of the woman, the more emotional and girlish Molina pirouettes on the other, and in the middle, poor Mathieu (for once, a very sympathetic Fernando Rey), caught in his own struggle, telling his story, unable to go even when he (justifiably) beats her at the height of his rage. A more conventional ending would have had the two parting ways after their physical exchange, but Bunuel had other plans, and his last sequence is one that only he could envision for a story about the polarities of love and hate, desire and repulsion.