Dreams, tales and “reality” intertwine and feed off each other in a surreal daisy chain that touches on ignorance, injustice, ecology, pornography, and the Church, linked by one common theme: the fear of freedom, the fascination of enslavement. Monica Vitti, Jean-Claude Brialy and Michel Piccoli head the cast of Bunuel's 31st film, made at the age of 74, and called by Tom Milne “a magnificent film, well worthy to stand alongside L'Age d'or, El, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel and Tristana as one of Bunuel's masterpieces... To Bunuel, as a good Surrealist whose aim over forty-five years has been to disturb rather than to please, the Academy Award to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie must have been something like a last straw... At any rate, he hasn't made the same mistake again. To be sure, there are a number of episodes which are irresistibly funny on any level...and there are brilliant comic asides... Overall, though, the pill is less easy to digest than the one in Discreet Charm... Bunuel this time makes the (narrative) interruptions yawn more widely, switching thematic ground on each occasion so that the audience is suspended, as it were, over an uncharted abyss. Precisely as he did in L'Age d'or, in fact; and precisely the same motifs recur in the new film, which once again makes the human mind, haunted by its ineffectual attempts to come to terms with Marx's ‘phantom of liberty', the battleground for a subversive challenge to conventional attitudes to sex, religion, politics... Bunuel's message, repeated over forty-five years...is that there is no mystery and no beyond, that the church teaches us to worship death, and that the true object of l'amour fou is life, liberty and love.” (Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin)