The Milky Way is set in comparatively modern times. Two vagabond pilgrims make a journey to Spain. Specifically, to Santiago de Compostela. The remains of James the Apostle were thought to be interred there. On the way they meet various characters from different time periods. Including Jesus, the devil, the Virgin Mary, Jesuits, Jansenists, the Marquis de Sade, assorted clerics and a prostitute. All provide vignettes in which points of heresy are debated. People are routinely condemned to death or challenged to duels based on the fine shading of the wording of faith. It runs like a cross between Pilgrim's Progress and The Canterbury Tales, with just a touch of Life of Brian in passing.
But what puts the Milky Way in a class apart from most films of its ilk even reverent biblical epics is its careful adherence to the wording of the theological debates running through Christianity's history. According to Buñuel (who deserted Catholicism for atheism at the age of sixteen), "Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes, the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology."
Strangely, the film was welcomed on release both by Buñuel's anti-religious following and (to his embarrassment) the The Holy See itself. According to his biographer, Buñuel had planned for many years a film that would affirm his atheism, the intellectual scepticism he held towards a church he had renounced in his teens. Director and producer compiled a list of apostasies and repression and concluded that most heresies came from six areas of doubt: (1) The double nature of Christ. Was he God or man? God and man? God pretending to be man? (2) The Trinity; how can three natures co-exist in the same entity? (3) The Immaculate Conception. Mary, a virgin, was nevertheless Christ's mother. (4) Transubstantiation. Can bread literally become the body of Christ? Is this just a metaphor? (5) The problem of God's omnipotence. Is God all-powerful? If so, do we enjoy free will? (6) Evil. Did God create evil? "The list suggested no obvious structure, so they simply dramatized incidents illustrating the heresies, linking them with a pair of wandering modern pilgrims."*
Now if you've read this far, you may well already be interested in theology, whether as a believer or atheist, but it highlights one of the big shortcomings of the film. The psychopathology of Christianity is mainly of interest to its own theologians. While the film will just about hold you if you have already pondered such questions, others may be wondering why he spent so long dwelling on such bilge. Having dispensed, he claims, with such imponderables, is he simply exorcising old ghosts from his early teens? One religious-based reviewer wrote: "Whilst it's certainly sceptical about Christianity, the fact that it's been written by people who know their Catholicism inside out, and are not afraid to make a film that is inaccessible to those do not, means the film at least deserves some respect even if ultimately we disagree with its, somewhat tenuous, conclusions." It is a position with which I could only guardedly agree.
"One thing troubles me," says a young acolyte in one of the film's Spanish Inquisition periods. "The burning of heretics may it not go against the will of the Holy Spirit?" The inquisitor replies, "It is the secular justice of men that punishes them. Not because they are heretics but for their sedition." Pushing his luck, the acolyte counters with, "But then, those whose brothers have been burnt will burn others, and so on. Each one believing he possesses the truth. Why these millions of deaths?" A stern glance and the acolyte desists before he too is cast to the flames. (The logic seems more applicable to the constant conflicts between Islam and Christianity or at least Palestine and Israel. In terms of burning people, the Catholic Church triumphed over every other brand of Christianity with unfettered brutality.)
Perhaps Buñuel found it amusing or even instructive to make this film. The millions of deaths, and the fanaticism that led to them, is not condemned. To the believer, perhaps they were God's will. But to this reviewer at least, Buñuel maybe falls short of his usual high achievements in elevating the good or bringing down hypocrisy. The Milky way is clever enough even erudite but ultimately an intellectual exercise rather than the powerful film it could have been.
*(nb - six areas of doubt are quoted from Baxter's biography of the director)
