A scream rips through the quiet of Toledo, occupied by Napoleonic troops. "¡Vivan las caenas!" ("Long live our chains!"). The cry comes from Spanish patriots facing a French firing squad. It’s an image Luis Buñuel lifts directly from a historical episode, one that feels like an etching by Goya animated by some mocking demiurge. This prologue, so historically specific and brutally realistic, serves as a false start, a brilliant red herring for the film that follows. Because after this paradoxical cry, which raises slavery to a banner of freedom, "The Phantom of Liberty" abandons all semblance of narrative coherence to become a relay-race device, an exquisitely surrealist mechanism that embodies the associative logic of a dream.

The film's structure is a manifesto in itself. Abandoning the tyranny of a protagonist and a linear plot, Buñuel and his confederate Jean-Claude Carrière devise a rhizomatic narrative, one that leaps from one character to another like a crazed butterfly. The camera follows a nanny, then the man she speaks to, then that man’s parents, then their doctor, and so on, in a carousel of the absurd with neither center nor periphery. This is not screenwriting laziness, but a radical philosophical choice. If liberty is a phantom, an illusion, then the narrative form that purports to order it and give it meaning must also be unmasked as an arbitrary convention. The film moves by pure association, by random contiguities, celebrating that hasard objectif (objective chance) so dear to André Breton, that magical coincidence which reveals the secret and irrational connections of reality. This is cinema as stream of consciousness, an exploration of the collective unconscious where every door opens onto a room bearing no logical relation to the previous one, recalling Alice’s disorienting tumble down the rabbit hole into a world governed by incomprehensible and ever-shifting rules.

Buñuel, now seventy-four and at the peak of his late-career French period, has distilled his iconoclastic rage into a corrosive yet elegant acid. The visual violence of Un Chien Andalou has transmuted into a conceptual violence, more subtle but no less devastating. The attack is no longer just on the Church and the bourgeoisie—his favorite targets—but on the very foundations of rational thought, on the superstructures that govern our behavior and which we call "civilization." The most famous sequence, the dinner party, is an essay in applied semiotics. A group of distinguished bourgeois gathers for a convivial evening. They are all seated on toilets, arranged around a table. They chat amiably about politics and art, then excuse themselves, one by one and with great discretion, to retreat into a small private stall to eat their meal in solitude.

With an inversion as simple as it is brilliant, Buñuel collapses the dichotomy between public and private, between physiological act and social ritual. Eating becomes a shameful act to be hidden, while evacuation is transformed into a social occasion. The absurdity of the scene lies not in the act itself, but in the imperturbable seriousness with which the characters adhere to this new, incomprehensible etiquette. It is here that the film reaches heights of Foucauldian critique: it is not our actions that are intrinsically "normal" or "deviant," but the entirely arbitrary web of social conventions that defines them as such. Change the convention, and our perception of decorum is turned upside down.

This deconstruction of logic continues unabated. Parents report their daughter’s disappearance to the police while the little girl is right there in the room with them, and even the police commissioner offers her sweets before sending her on her way. Her physical existence is negated by a bureaucratic definition: if she has been declared "missing," then she cannot be present. It is the triumph of the signifier over the signified, a sinister echo of Magritte’s pipe that "is not a pipe." Language no longer describes reality; it creates and replaces it, even at the cost of denying the evidence of the senses. Likewise, a respectable gentleman who randomly fires on a crowd from a skyscraper is, after his trial, released to applause and requests for autographs, transformed into a celebrity. Transgression, if sufficiently spectacularized, is reabsorbed and neutralized by the media system—an insight that anticipates by decades the culture of toxic fame and the reality show.

The film is a catalogue of paradoxes, a bestiary of inexplicable behaviors presented with the utmost naturalism. Monks play poker using holy cards as chips; a police prefect receives a phone call from his dead sister (who is calling to tell him it wasn’t her on the phone); ostriches wander through a bedroom. Buñuel offers no explanations. His method is that of an entomologist observing the bizarre habits of an alien species: man. This approach, combining black humor with an almost documentary-like coolness, surprisingly aligns him with certain outcomes of Ionesco’s Theatre of the Absurd or, to risk a more contemporary parallel, with the anarchic, fragmentary spirit of Monty Python, whose Flying Circus was deconstructing British society with similar weapons in those very years.

Made in 1974, "The Phantom of Liberty" breathes the air of a post-utopian era. The revolutionary hopes of May '68 had by then faded, leaving behind a sense of disillusionment and the awareness that the true prisons are not barricades or governments, but the mental structures we have internalized. The liberty of the title is a phantom precisely because the act of seeking it presupposes the existence of a model, an alternative, whereas Buñuel suggests we are trapped in a system of signifiers that refer to one another ad infinitum, with no way out. The final cry, shouted from one police officer to another at the zoo as a crowd riots, is the closing of the circle opened in Toledo: "Down with liberty!" It is the final acceptance of the paradox: the demand to be freed from liberty itself, from this illusory burden that forces us to make choices within an already rigged system.

Visually, the film has a classical composure that makes the absurd all the more alienating. The cinematography by Edmond Richard is clean, almost academic, far from any surrealist aestheticism. It is reality itself, observed with an impassive gaze, that reveals itself to be a delirium. Buñuel needs no tricks or special effects; he need only orchestrate situations in which our most basic certainties (causality, identity, decorum) are systematically violated.

"The Phantom of Liberty" is the intellectual testament of an old anarchist who has stopped throwing bombs in favor of a more profound sabotage: that of common sense. It is a work that does not age, because it attacks not a specific custom or policy, but the very nature of our being social animals. It is an invitation to laugh at our own invisible cages, to recognize the absurdity of the rituals that punctuate our lives, and to suspect that, perhaps, logic is nothing more than the most widespread of mental disorders. And as a Napoleonic rifleman kisses the stone statue of a noblewoman, and an ostrich impassively observes the chaos from its perch, we realize that the only true freedom granted us is to contemplate, bewildered and amused, the inexplicable spectacle of existence.