The following is my mildly dyspeptic entry in this week’s Buñuel-a-thon, continuing through Sunday (9/30/07) over at la casa de Flickhead. The image above is captured from the entertaining short documentary, El Náufrago de la Calle Providencia, which focuses largely on the great surrealist’s bartending passion. It’s an extra on the Criterion edition of The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

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If ever there was a filmmaker who can leave a sometimes literal minded classicist like me speechless, it’s Luis Buñuel. Just as his characters keep waking up in The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie to the realization that they’ve just dreamed the last several minutes of the film — including other characters’ dreams — very few filmmakers have been as skilled at blurring the line between the conscious and the unconscious. What makes his films great also makes them seem to repulse attempts to discuss them in an understandable fashion.

So, I tried looking at the movies in terms of style and influence. Watching The Phantom of Liberty, I was struck by how much the transitions between its tangentially related sketches resembled a more civilized episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Of course, I would have to have called that post “The Discrete Charm of the Knights Who Say Ni.”

But then I did a little research and found that, yes, nearly everyone who’s ever seen the film has had exactly the same notion…and I couldn’t even argue that Python was influenced by Buñuel because Phantom was released in 1974 and Python debuted on the BBC in 1969. So, maybe “the old man,” as he was affectionately called by his cocktail party friends in Mexico, was a closet Python fan, but more likely he wasn’t aware of them. Not much of a blog post there.

I then re-watched Discrete Charm trying to find something else to latch onto. Maybe something in terms of visuals. Well, there was the same high key lighting and use of light colors Buñuel favored at this point, same kind of lengthy shots…Interesting for someone else to write about, but not really my thing. I kind of wished I had for gone for another look at That Obscure Object of Desire instead, which I think I like even better and perhaps would have given me something more dramatically solid to write about. (My favorite Buñuel film, The Exterminating Angel, is unavailable on DVD. Damn it.)

Then I remember the Buñuel martini as described so well by cocktail-fundamentalist Jim Emerson. A beverage I had yet to try, but found disagreeable in theory. I have developed my own personal martini beliefs over the last couple of years which differ substantially from Mr. Buñuel’s and Mr. Emerson’s.

For me, the secret ingredient in a good martini is a small amount of icy cold water (preferably with many tiny ice flakes). I’m all for the old man’s ultra-cold ice at minus 20 degrees centigrade (though, even if I had a thermometer handy to check for that, I’m not sure how you make ice get colder). However, in my theory, the gin (or vodka, I roundly reject Emersonian mixological purism) should be room temperature, never “frozen.” In my experience, this has lead to martinis that are glorified gin or vodka shots.

Also, I prefer a somewhat less dry martini. Again, without some vermouth what you have is a shot of cold hard liquor — though my opinion about just how much is the right amount changes on an almost nightly basis. The Buñuel recipe calls for stirring a small amount of vermouth and a half a dematase spoon of bitters in the shaker and then dumping it out. I’ve never found these ultra-dry martinis that likable. Still, for the purposes of open-minded experimentation, I figured the thing to do was try it for myself.

The Buñuel recipe as described by Jim E. calls for putting the gin, vermouth and even the shaker and glasses in the fridge (not, thanks be, the freezer) the day before. For vermouth, though the recipe called for Noilly Pratt, I decided to go with the Cinzano I had on hand. It’s a very good dry vermouth and I’m but a poor blogger and, besides, who knows how far I’d have to drive to come up with a bottle of this apparent Rolls Royce of vermouths in my less than fashionable corner of the O.C. — and then, only to dump it out.

Of course, I had to wait at least a day before giving it the full treatment. I wound up taking two. However, when dinner time last night finally rolled around, I was horrified to learn that I had forgotten to put a martini glass in the fridge. I wasn’t going to wait yet another day and I wasn’t going to be any more half-assed than I absolutely had to be, so I compromised and put a glass in the freezer and, as penance for my fecklessness, watched L’Âge d’or on a very empty stomach.

So, though neither my glass nor my vermouth were up to full Buñuel spec, I went ahead and made the drink as written and…it was very good. A very apt variation on the classic. The old man knew what he was doing. And, there I was, unable to disagree with him very strongly — another good blog post idea killed. Not that I don’t prefer my way of martini-making, but why rain on the old man’s parade by describing the highly heretical Westal dirty VODKA martini?

In fact, I enjoyed the Buñuel variation so much, I had another as I prepared to watch the film again with the commentary track, though I was still hungry and I’m usually kind of a lightweight.

So why was I surprised when I could barely finish my dinner and woke up feeling, well, not hung over exactly, but kind of suavely bitter in a Fernando Rey kind of way, and way more anticlerical than usual?

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For more on our rich Buñuelian bartending heritage, see this fine Buñuel-a-thon post by Rob. His slightly modified version of the Buñueloni cocktail might be the perfect example of Jim Emerson’s hair of the Andalusian dog. As the saying goes, definitely better than a razor in the eyeball.