This is a bizarre surrealist religious satire caught somewhere between a short and a feature (as it is 43 minutes long). It is acclaimed as one of Buñuel’s best films but I think you really have to be steeped in Catholicism to appreciate it.

Simón is one of those pillar-standing ascetics from the very late Roman Empire. He gets a promotion almost immediately, but it is show and described in such a way that us non-Catholics (or non-fundamentalists) might not get the joke. And that goes for at least some of the humour, which relies on being fairly familiar with Christianity’s absurdities. I was more well-versed in this stuff when I was younger. So it’s possible that I would have found the film a lot funnier when I was more immersed in trying to understand and critique religion.

But some of the humour is bawdy or slapstick, and so that stuff carries through time and place. That stuff helps but it also gives the film a weird tone if you don’t get enough of the religious satire. It feels like it is swinging tonally in part because I forgot everything I knew about Buñuel since the last time I saw one of this films, and I didn’t realize the miracles were joke miracles. (In retrospect, they seem like jokes but, again, I don’t really have the background for this stuff.) As someone who knows there is no god, and who doesn’t believe in miracles, I found them a little confusing. (I couldn’t always tell if he was ridiculing the Church or if we ridiculing the hypocritical laypeople and monks.)

But the ending is utterly bizarre and kind of hilarious. It makes a point I think so often us nonbelievers want to make to the overly pious: are you really that scared of enjoying yourselves?

I respect this, and with some context I can appreciate it more, but I still think this film requires a little too much in the way of specific knowledge about a particular type of faith to be as funny as many claim it is. And that’s a problem because the people most likely to get all of it are the least likely to enjoy it.

7/10