After that bracing start, there are a number of scenes involving an anguished young man who seems to be trying to make emotional contact with a turbulent young woman who repels his advances. There are no clues to behavior. Ants pour from a hole in the young man's palm. Rebuffed, he puts on a curious harness and drags towards the young woman a huge contraption consisting of two priests lying on their backs, tied to a grand piano across which is draped a dead donkey.
What comes through this 15-minute film is the feeling that it would all make sense if its scenes were assembled in the right order. But of course it would not make sense, whatever the order, and I take this to be the point of the film. The reality we inhabit daily, our domestic interiors and their emotional dramas, the hands helplessly caressing a young woman's breasts, the tennis racket she uses to drive away her unwanted suitor (the surrealists were intensely middle class), the small section of space-time we blunder through, are all equally unreal, though meaning and sanity seem tantalizingly within our grasp.
L'Age d'Or is a longer and more provocative film, guying the Catholic Church and sending up as many of our cherished notions as its director and scriptwriter can turn their attention to. A blind man is abused, a son is casually shot by his father, an old woman is slapped, the heroine sucks rapturously on the toe of a marble Apollo. Christ is played by the hero of Sade's 120 days of Sodom, and the film ends with a crucifix on which several scalps are nailed. I prefer Un Chien Andalou, but in L'Age d'Or there is the same sense that everyday reality is only a hand's breadth away, but will never be reached. In short, rather like life today. Welcome to the surrealist world, which you never knew you inhabited.
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