It’s an easy first impulse to think of 1965’s surrealist black comedy Simon Of The Desert as another of Luis Buñuel’s infamous blasphemies, the tale of a holy fool who tries to honor God, but ultimately bows to the devil’s temptations. After all, Buñuel was a renowned non-believer (“Thank God I’m still an atheist,” he famously said) and a persistent critic of organized religion, and the compromises made by his Christ-like hero and his followers don’t dispute the point. Yet Buñuel’s point of view is more ambivalent than it appears, at least in the sense that he admires the hardcore asceticism of a man who devotes his life to God, even if that effort is rendered meaningless by earthly wickedness. Buñuel’s film features some outrageous sights—a jet plane that flies overhead, whisking the action from the 4th century to a ‘60s New York discotheque; the devil as breast-baring provocateur; a coffin that scuttles along the desert floor like a torpedo—but there’s an underlying austerity to it too, rooted in the disappointment of a reality that falls short of faith’s noblest intentions.