In his next to last film, the great Luis Buñuel makes a hilarious assault on the notion that the human race is in any sense free. As with many of his late masterpieces, such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Milky Way, the director strings together a series of anarchic events tinged with the surrealism that had been his signature since he helped found the influential art movement in the 1920s and 1930s. In one, a pair of detectives search for a missing girl who is right in front of them, and in another, a group of aristocrats defecate publicly at a formal dinner, while secreting themselves to perform the shameful act of eating. Always a faithful Freudian, the director insists on the powerful role of unconscious processes in determining our behavior and the arbitrariness of the elaborate social arrangements which result therefrom. Appropriately, the film opens in anarchy and ends with cries of "long live chains."