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The phrase an obscure object of desire is not a common one, so I have taken it to be a reference to the critically acclaimed 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire. It was the last film directed by the great Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel who was in his 80s when he made it and I think it would be reasonable to regard it as a considered valedictory piece summing up the focus that he seems to have had on the perversity of human desire and also, as he once wrote, his wish to convey to his viewers, “the absolute certainty that they do not live in the best of all possible worlds.”
The film is set in Spain and France with a backdrop of repeated terrorist incidents and tells the story, through a series of flashbacks by an ageing French aristocrat, Mathieu. He recounts his experiences to some fellow train passengers as he returns from Seville to Paris. He had become besotted with a beautiful young Spanish woman, Conchita, who is played interchangeably by two different actresses, with different characteristics. The young woman had come to his home to work as a maid but fled following his early amorous advances. This pattern is repeated as he meets her again in different contexts where she repeatedly stimulates and then frustrates his romantic and sexual desires.
While he gives her (and her naïve, pious Catholic mother) presents, money and his total attention, she teases him with alternating seductive interest and humiliating rejection, but always refusing actual sexual intercourse. Each iteration of the process increases their passion, frustration, and entanglement until the climax where at her request he buys her a house in her home city of Seville, to which he has followed her. However, when he responds to her invitation to come to her in their new home, she locks him out on the other side of the grill gate to the courtyard of the house, says how she utterly hates and despises him, and then makes love in front of him, with one of her young men.
Mathieu is demented and when C