Film: The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie
Director: Luis Buñuel
Country: Spain / France
Released: September 1972
Runtime: 101 minutes
Genre: Surrealism
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Influenced: Pedro Almodóvar, Terry Gilliam, Catherine Breillat, Michel Haneke, Jean-Pierre Jeunet
The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie was the third of six co-writing collaborations between Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, and without doubt the crowning glory of their partnership. A French production, the film's story revolves around six bourgeois friends who constantly try to have a meal together but are repeatedly interrupted by increasingly bizarre and surreal circumstances. The group includes Ambassador Raphael Acosta (Fernando Rey) of the fictitious Republic of Miranda, his friends Alice (Stéphane Audran) and Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Cassel), the Thévenot couple, including Simone (Delphine Seyrig), and Monsieur Thévenot's sister Florence (Bulle Ogier). Despite their attempts, they are interrupted by strange events such as a military invasion, death and ghostly apparitions, preventing them from ever actually having their meal.
Buñuel found inspiration for the film from an anecdote by film producer Serge Silberman, about his being surprised to find six hungry friends show up at his front door unannounced, and from this small seed the director was able to rediscover his creative spark and with Carrière conjure up a film about repetition, as well as middle class hypocrisy and absurdity. Buñuel freely incorporates dream sequences and surrealistic elements into the movie, including an early scene at a local restaurant that's run out of food owing to the funeral of the owner, which is taking place behind a curtain. Further attempts to eat together are disrupted by a lieutenant who recounts a disturbing tale of childhood revenge and murder, a ghostly friar who asks for a prayer for the dead and, in one of the film's most iconic scenes, when the friends sit down for a meal only to realise they're on a stage, being watched by a silent audience. Black Mirror, eat your heart out.
The plot takes a darker turn when it's revealed that Ambassador Acosta is involved in drug trafficking and has to dodge an assassination attempt. Toward the end, the friends find themselves walking on an endless road, seemingly lost and with no destination in sight, a symbolic representation of their existential quandary. The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie was particularly innovative for its use of dream logic and non-linear storytelling, making it difficult for the audience to distinguish between what's real and what's a dream, a technique that blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Additionally, Buñuel employed absurdism and black humour to satirise the rituals of the bourgeoisie, their pretensions and their fundamental emptiness, making the film a potent social critique.
Buñuel's criticism stems from his view that the middle classes, despite their pretensions of civility and good morality, are fundamentally corrupt and devoid of genuine empathy or human concern. Throughout the film, the characters exhibit an uncanny ability to remain unfazed by disturbing stories of murder or the evidence of drug trafficking, revealing their indifference to violence and suffering. Such was the power of the film's satire and its surrealist images that it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1973 and was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay, a rarity for a non-English language film. Now considered a seminal work in the surrealist film canon, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie hasn't lost any of its power to provoke and throw a spotlight on middle-class hypocrisy.
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