Bunuel

This vibrant, anecdote-packed biography of Spanish film director Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) provides an intimate portrait of a secretive man. Baxter (Stanley Kubrick) zeroes in on the obsessions that drove the filmmaker and nurtured his films: fetishism, an anarchist-tinged faith in communism, hatred of Franco's regime and a near-pathological hostility to the Catholic Church, in which he was raised. Bunuel emerges as a jealous man of rigid habits, a cross-dresser beset by fear of women, an audacious artist plagued by Meniere's syndrome, an inner ear disorder that destroyed his hearing later in life. Drawing on family papers, interviews with Bunuel's son and former associates, and archival materials, Baxter plunges readers into Bunuel's varied milieu, from Madrid to surrealist circles in mid-1920s Paris, to 1940s New York and Hollywood, to the Spanish emigre community in Mexico, where the filmmaker took refuge in 1945, under attack in his native Spain for his left-wing politics. Probing the chemistry among scriptwriters, producers and Bunuel's personal circumstances, Baxter taps into the creative dynamo that gave us movies like Viridiana, Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Photos. (Apr.)