A prologue tells us the Way of Saint James, the pilgrim’s road from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, was also known as The Milky Way, the constellation followed at night by its travelers. Two modern day pilgrims, Pierre and Jean, are on the road for reasons which remain vague, having little luck in catching rides. They encounter a man who asks the first if he has any money and when he replies no, tells him then you shall have none. He turns to the other and upon being told he has a little, gives him a sizeable banknote. He tells the first to father a child with a prostitute and name the child “ye are not my people”. and to the second, he says name the child “no more mercy”. So opens The Milky Way, Bunuel’s sly 1968 film, the first of a trilogy on philosophic themes, taking in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.

According to Bunuel’s scenario partner, Jean-Claude Carriere, the initial idea was very broad, a film about the notion of heresy. Carriere describes this wonderfully, heretics are those who choose their own mistakes, zeroing in on some small untruth within a doctrine and replacing it with their own truth, even if it subjects them to danger or death. With this in mind Carriere assembled a vast amount of material from the history of the church, both orthodox and heretical, relating to the six core mysteries.

Bunuel was out scouting locations for The Milky Way during the student worker rebellion of May 1968. On the surface The Milky Way would seem to bear no relationship to the political climate of the time, Carriere says he and Bunuel were treated as something like heretics for even wanting to make a film about religion. Still, though the dominant Orthodoxies may shift, their tendency to claim absolute ownership over their domain remains constant. Bunuel had mixed feelings about the upheavals. On the one hand he was amazed and gratified to find surrealist slogans from his youth scrawled on walls all over Paris, on the other he predicted the rise of the seemingly random and pointless violence to come, and which he would depict in subsequent films. He wondered whether Breton’s idea of the perfect surrealist act as opening fire randomly on a crowd hadn’t been an inspiration for the Red Brigades, Bauder-Meinhoff and others.

I first saw The Milky Way in the late ‘70’s during a Bunuel festival, which was my first exposure to any of his work. Bunuel draws on a number of different orthodox and heterodox viewpoints across millennia, each of them taken at absolute face value, but not easily identifiable. Though knowing a little about the various sectarian beliefs presented is useful in decoding the film, it’s not necessary. Bunuel is conducting an investigation into the very properties of belief itself. The crucial point is the peculiar knack humans have for staking claims upon the invisible and abstract, as if they were quantifiable and then defending their territory from claims jumpers, so to speak, at all costs. This absurdity is, I think, what interests Bunuel, rather than any of the competing ideas in and of themselves. Director Milos Forman called The Milky Way highly political because this same notion of orthodoxy opposed by heterodoxy applied equally to the soviet system he’d known in Czechoslovakia. The same could be said today of the degraded political systems of the west, or the various fundamentalisms into which so many of our human institutions have devolved.

Bunuel once opined that Crime and Punishment would have been more interesting had Dostoyevsky suddenly abandoned Raskolnikov entirely to follow another character after a chance encounter. He greatly admired The Saragossa Manuscript, particularly its use of layers upon layers of embedded fragmented narratives, a principle which he really took to heart a few years later in The Phantom of Liberty.

In The Milky Way he has yet to completely abandon the linear narrative, employed here to link together the other layers, the pilgrims' encounters in time and space, and provide an emotional context for them. In Pierre and Jean we have two everymen in a classic picaresque story, two heroes, as Ian Christie notes, each more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, on a journey unstuck in time.

Journeying through "a forest of symbols", as one critic put it, they encounter

- a child with stigmata sitting alongside the road

- a rite of 4th C Priscillian Dualists

- Jean telling Pierre his beard makes him look more trustworthy leads to a vision of Mary telling Jesus not to shave

- a heretic is condemned by the inquisition for his disagreement on a small point of scripture

- a bishop has his predecessor's body dug up and burned for heresy because of writings found after his death

- two followers of the the dead bishop interrupt with their anti-Trinitarian views, flee from the soldiers, through a forest to a lake where two hunters have left their clothes while swimming, put them on and enter the 20th century right in front of our eyes

- an angel of death at the scene of an auto accident tells Pierre, who's suffering from sore feet, to take the dead man's shoes

- an 18th century sword fight cum debate between a Jesuit and a Jansenist ends apparently amicably

- the maitre‘dhotel at an exclusive restaurant regales his staff with theological musings while setting up for the night

- an invitation to join a picnic at a religious school, Institution Lamartine has them grateful for a meal as little girls recite dogma by rote, as part of the entertainment, repeating the refrain “he is anathema” on cue, after every described transgression, the picnic scene is intercut with Jean’s reverie, armed rebels bearing a red and black flag stride resolutely up an alley, arriving at the town square they find the Pope, line up and shoot him, back at the picnic a shot rings out, the man next to Jean asks what was that, is there a shooting range nearby, to which he replies somewhat sheepishly "that was me, I was imagining the execution of a pope".

Bunuel employs many of the same actors to found in several of his late period, French financed films, Muni, Michel Piccoli, as the Marquis de Sade, Julien Bertheau, Delphine Seyrig, Francois Maistre and several others appear, adding to the feeling of connectedness between this and the two films to come. Co-scenarist Carriere portrays the Bishop Priscillian and Bunuel appears as the Pope. The two lead actors, Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzief, steal the show with superb naturalistic performances. Their implacability in the face of all these bizarre ideas and situations provides the emotional weight of the film.

In a video introduction to The Milky Way, Carriere, relates an anecdote which says much about Bunuel. It seems a friend who ran a theatre in Copenhagen told him that when he first showed The Milky Way, 30 or 40 Romani men, women and children came in a group to see it, the next day they came back, not entirely the same group, but a mix of new and repeat viewers of about the same size. They understood neither the French of the dialog nor the Danish of the subtitles. For eight days in a row they returned. This greatly intrigued the cinema manager and finally he told them they could enter free, which they did for that viewing, and never came back again. Carriere says he told Bunuel this story knowing nothing else about it. He listened, asked Carriere to tell the story again, which he did. He listened, then said and now we will never refer to this again because when you are lucky enough to encounter the real mystery, you must respect it.

Arriving on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, Pierre and Jean encounter a prostitute, Delphine Seyrig, who tells them the town is deserted. It seems the relics have turned out not to be St. james, but a headless body, some guy named Priscillian, who’d been the first heretic executed by the church. She tells them she wants them to give her a baby and leads the two into the woods. Two present day blind men encounter Jesus and his apostles in the woods and ask to be cured. The miracle is duly performed, but as the two follow along they come to a ditch which they probe with their staffs. Bunuel himself said he didn’t know if they were still blind but didn’t wish to appear ungrateful, or the use of the cane was so ingrained into them they continued out of habit. Once again the mystery must be respected. Perhaps for this same reason, Bunuel had a horror of the psychological analysis to which some critics, notably Pauline Kael, invariably subjected his work. It disrespected the mystery.

As expected with a Criterion release, everything about the package is first rate, an excellent print, re-worked and much more accurate subtitles than I remember, short films of commentary by notable critics and scholars ,and a 30 page booklet with essays by Carlos Fuentes and Mark Polizzotti, as well as an interview with Bunuel himself.