Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie

Director Luis Bunuel is often described as a surrealist, but the word misapplied in reference to his later works, where the the term absurdism is much more appropriate. Such is the case with the Academy Award-winning THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, which begins with four friends who arrive at their hosts' home only to discover they have arrived on the wrong night--a plausible situation. But before the film has run its course, Bunuel unravels his tale of a meal that never quite happens in the most unexpected ways imaginable.

The film works on several levels, mocking social conventions, the church, and eventually spilling its action into a series of overlapping nightmares in which various attempts to dine are frustrated by everything from the corpse of a restaurant manager in a nearby room to military maneuvers. On one memorable occasion, the friends are invited to dine and are seated around an elegant table--when a curtain suddenly rises behind them and reveals them to be seated on a stage before a hostile audience! The cast (which features Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier, Stephane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel as the constantly frustrated diners) plays with considerable aplomb, performing the most irrational scenes with a magnificent realism. When combined with Bunuel's absurdist story, the result is a disquieting yet often very funny discourse on frustrated appetites both real and imagined, and with many layers of incidental meaning along the way.

A word of caution to the uninitiated: Bunuel is not for those who seek a tidy plot line with clear-cut meanings. But if you come to it with an open mind, you'll find plenty of food for thought!

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Bunuel is arguably the greatest of all filmmakers. With the possible exceptions of Hitchcock and Fassbinder, I can think of no other director who so completely understood the potential of the medium to transcend the traditional conventions of narrative, or exploited this potential with such élan. And he doesn't rely on special effects: we enter the surreal realm so seamlessly that it at times seems banal. This is especially the case in 'Le charme': banal people have banal sub-consciousnesses.

In order to begin to appreciate Bunuel I had to immerse myself in his milieu, so foreign was his sensibility to the usual expectations I had brought with me into a movie theater.

It took me several viewings to get the 'jokes' if 'Le charme'. The Ambassador from some obscure Latin American country ('Miranda', or 'wonder', a nod to Shakespeare), supports this little microcosm of comfortable Parisian bourgeois respectability with cocaine smuggled in diplomatic pouches. Guests arrive for a dinner party on the wrong evening, and interrupt the hosts having sex. A wake is being held in the back room of the restaurant they are planning to dine at. Ice cubes for martinis must be 'exactly zero degrees'. Elegant ladies sit down for a fashionable afternoon tea, only to be told by their waiter that the restaurant has run out of water (?!!). A soldier then comes to their table and relates his parricidal dream, while the polite ladies listen to him unfazed. One of the ladies discreetly slips away for an assignation with another one's husband. Only Bunuel!

Doubtless the inspiration for this film comes from the Latin Bunuel's lifetime of experience observing the French in situ. Much of its fun comes from simply watching the French be so . . . French. And there is no bourgeois like a French bourgeois!

Much of 'Le Charme' takes place in the nightmares of its characters: you are sitting down for a dinner being hosted by a general, only to realize that you are on stage (with a prompter giving a cue from Don Juan: 'Invite the commander's ghost for dinner!'); your elegant dinner party is broken up by a gang of thugs looking to kill you. However, you are so wedded to the ceremony of the dinner party that you get caught stealing a piece of meat from the table under which you are hiding (and end up dying like a dog!)

I could see this movie a hundred times and always find something new. I would never be bored by it.

Bunuel is very funny, but he is also dense and difficult. One doesn't realize the true complexity of his films because they all seem so effortless. Nothing great comes easily. He's like great Bordeaux: you can't quaff it -- it demands to be sipped.

Bunuel is famous for having the lowest shoot to take ratio of any filmmaker, less than 2:1. Second takes were rare (compare with the reams that end up on the cutting room floor for the typical Spielberg film.) He knew exactly what he wanted to see before he shot. Hitchcock, a director who resembles Bunuel in many ways, famously referred to actors as 'cattle'. For Bunuel, they were probably more like toy soldiers. This isn't to say that he didn't get brilliant performances out of them, especially from his screen alter-ego, the wonderful Fernando Rey.

Henry Miller dubbed his good friend Luis Bunuel "The Last Heretic". I can't think of a higher compliment. Bunuel's memoirs, 'My Last Sigh', are a must read for anyone who wants to have an appreciation of Paris in the 20s, the of art in the last century, and martinis, made as they should be, with gin.

There are not many artists who could tell the same joke over and over again and get away with it creating the film as brilliant, funny, absurd, witty, and clever as Buñuel's "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", 1972. The story of six friends who try to arrange and have a nice dinner together but cannot complete (or even start) their meal does not sound very exiting but wait until you watch this comedy. I've always known how interesting surrealism is but I never thought how funny it could be. I've seen the film four or five times - it only gets better with each viewing. Highly recommended.

9.5/10.

"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", a leisurely paced, incisive satire on social mores and class hypocrisy, opens with a group of friends arriving on the wrong day of a dinner engagement. this is only the begining of a succession of unexpected and unusual events to follow. The dinner party is the movie's main setting and it is there that reality and illusion often times blend imperceptibly together. The film is structured as a series of surreal sequences, which prompted esteemed film critic Pauline Kael to opine 'His(Director Louis Bunuel) indifference to dramatic logic is complete.' And how. Bunuel's narrative plays an elaborate game with the viewer through it's subconscious imagery and audacious use of time. His tendency to experiment with technique and form often times led to discovery and innovation. The cinema of Louis Bunuel invariably deals with the discrepancy between appearance and reality; decorum and desire. His world view was subversive and anarchistic. He was a cheerful pessimist, skeptical but not susceptible to Bergmanian despair. His skepticism extended to all of those he found playing too neat a social game. The filmmaker's career was one sustained assault on authoritarianism. Witness an indiscreet character in the film who claims: 'No one system can help the masses acquire refinement.' He believed man was, unconsciously, a slave to custom and aimed to shock viewers out of their unthinking acceptance of established values. "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"(An Academy Award winner in 1972 for Best Foreign Film) is a boldly inventive picture. Dozens of frames are filled with clever filmic devices: environmental noises increase inordinately during routine conversations; an ambiguous procession is inserted freely within the text. These cinematic ploys add intrigue to the already peculiar goings-on. The walk by the main group of characters along a country roadside is mysterious and compelling. The players are noticeably silent and contemplative. Is this an anxious dream? The afterlife? An insignificant flashback? Whichever, the recurring sequence underscores the obliqueness and cool obscurity of the film. One might not identify closely with the disenchanted Bunuelian sensibility or the unsentimental stance he takes, however one knows immediately and unmistakably that they are in the gifted hands of a film technician like a Godard or Kurosawa. A director in complete control of his medium. A highly personal filmmaker frequently referred as 'a poet of hallucination who follows the caprices of his fantastical imagination.' Someone whose fanciful paths of creation were invariably led by the irrational. "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", with it's arresting mixture of calculation and carelessness, remains a unique and influential movie. The acerbic films of Robert Altman and the perverse mischievousness of the Coen brothers films, to mention but a few, pay a large debt to the strange universe and unconventional perspective of Louis Bunuel. Film lovers uninitiated in surrealist cinema will find "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" an alluring and beguiling crash course.

In Paris, the ambassador Don Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey) of the South American country Miranda, who is also an smuggler of cocaine, comes to a dinner part in the house of Henri (Jean-Pierre Cassel) and Alice Sénéchal (Stephane Audran) with their common friends M. Thevenot (Paul Frankeur), his wife Simone Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig) and her sister Florence (Bulle Ogier) but on the day before the scheduled. Henri is not at home and they invite Alice to go with them to a restaurant close to her house, but an incident does not allow them to have meal together in the place. They reschedule another meal together many times, but problems occur in every occasion and they do not succeed in their intent.

"Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie" is one of the funniest movies of the master of the surrealism Luis Buñuel. This intellectual director was a great critic of the values of the Bourgeoisie Class and this movie is a witty joke, blurring the fears this class with reality and nightmare, and open to the most different interpretations. The empty, hypocrite and pointless existence of the Bourgeoisie Class is highlighted by the shallow interest of the characters in meal, sex, etiquette and money and their final journey to nowhere; or the behavior of the disloyal ambassador that betrays his friend having a love affair with his wife; smuggles cocaine using his diplomatic immunity; or shoots the toy of a terrorist in front of the Embassy of Miranda. Further, in 1972, the countries of South America lived under military dictatorship with many exiled people living in Paris, and the arrogant Don Rafael Acosta is hilarious denying the truth about his country. Buñuel does not spare the church in his satire, with the funny Monsignor Dufour trying to interfere in every subject without the appropriate knowledge. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "O Discreto Charme da Burguesia" ("The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie")