Another of Buñuel’s attempts to "épater les bourgeois," The Phantom of Liberty is an episodic work that radiates out from a brutal historical prologue set in nineteenth-century Toledo, where drunken French troops randomly murder the citizenry as they desecrate the church. In the first of a series of abrupt shifts, Buñuel segues to a modern-day Parisian park, where two au pairs chat on about the horrors of Napoleonic times as their young charges are accosted by a man. In this knight’s tour of the modern condition, the film shifts to the bourgeois parents and their doctors and nurses, and then further outward to embrace a seemingly random, yet systematic, critique of contemporary European psychopathology.