An adaptation of a novel by French author Pierre Loüys, reset by the director in Andalusian Spain, Buñuel’s final film reprises the central contradictions that face the male characters in all his films and places them in the service of a sardonic critique of bourgeois repression and male subjectivity. Told in flashback by the widower Mathieu (played by Fernando Rey, Buñuel’s frequent alter-ego), the story focuses on the character’s unfortunate infatuation with the maid Conchita. In a radical ploy that creatively channels the clouded sensibility and conflicted passions of his aging protagonist, Buñuel cast two actresses at once—the French Carole Bouquet and Spanish actress Angela Molina—to play the seductive maid. That Obscure Object of Desire ends literally with a bang as it brings the director’s career full circle back to the Andalusian landscape invoked in his first work in film.