The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie is a celebrated film by a well-regarded surrealist auteur. Given that, and given my taste for such things, I went in with high hopes. But I rarely found it more than mildly amusing.

It's undeniably clever. Bunuel's dry humor sparkles, and his gentle social critique hits its marks more often than not. The penultimate shot of Fernando Rey with a slice of ham stuffed in his mouth is one of the funniest and most memorable cinematic images I've encountered in quite a while. And Delphine Seyrig breezes through her scenes with hilariously blithe detachment. But the parts don't quite add up to a greater whole.

The film reaches its peak about halfway through, once a pattern has been established (dinner parties will be attended, but dining will be teasingly withheld) and the central narrative has begun to digress and fragment. As the surreal intrudes upon the quotidian, a delicious sort of suspense sets in. Pity, then, that the last forty-five minutes squander this tension, retreating to tepid farce and a rather obvious critique of upper-crust social mores.

Someone on the film's board once quoted the director as saying, "the bourgeois moral is the immoral thing for me, that which should be combated; the moral founded in our unjust social institutions as the religion, the homeland, the family, the culture, in short, the so-called pillars of the society." Thematically, the film consists of variations on this familiar counter-cultural conceit, and such thinking was certainly voguish in the late 60s and early 70s. It's an interesting and potentially valid argument, but I found the film's handling of the idea superficial, even clichéd.

The same could be said, I suppose, of El Topo or Sweet Movie, but those films transcend glib adherence to fashionable ideologies and period style. I don't think La Charme Discret does that. Of course, it's more an urbane, low-key comedy of manners than a flaming art-bomb thrown through the window of middlebrow complacency, so perhaps the comparison is unfair. As a comedy, it is appealing, in a mild sort of way.

Finally, I was disappointed by the film's look. I understand that the bland stage-set dining rooms are a device, and a successful one. But surreal detours aside, there isn't much to look at. The camera placements and movements are almost ploddingly ordinary, and while they capture the events adequately, they don't do anything interesting with them.

I'm being unkind, of course, and terribly unfair. By stressing these complaints, I'm giving short shrift the wonderful performances and amusingly understated comic dialog. I'm overlooking the fabulously eerie dream sequences and Bunuel's masterful control of tone. I gave La Charme Discret a 7/10 because it IS charming, funny and somewhat intellectually intriguing. But I still came out of the experience feeling a bit let down...

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.

I'll be honest, I mostly like my movies to be conventional which simply means to me that they should have a beginning, middle and ending, plus a credible plot and believable characters. I've never cottoned on to the cinema of the surreal or the absurd and have always thought you can keep all that Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodovar stuff away from my door.

But, I live in Spain now and I have a learned Spanish neighbour who has encouraged me to watch some Spanish cinema particularly the films of Bunuel and so a few months ago I made a point of watching his earlier work "Viridiana" which I very much enjoyed and deciding to dip into his repertoire again, selected this particular movie, even if it was produced in France, as it seems to be his best known and perhaps most celebrated work. So glad I did.

Did I perceive every nuance of the director's intentions? Probably not. Did I understand the bigger arguments he was making, which to be fair is pretty much all there in the title? I think so though I can't be sure. Was I kept watching all the way through down to the delicious combination of intrigue, amusement and curiosity? Absolutely!

The narrative is simple. Three male-female couples want to sit down to dinner in modern-day France. The males are all in some way connected to the governance of an imaginary French protectorate in South America called Miranda with the most prominent among them being Fernando Rey as the country's ambassador, but all six are of the distinctly upper class set.

But don't be fooled into thinking that these suited and booted individuals are pillars of society. Far from it. As well as apparently having designs on each other's wives we also see that the three men are involved in the illegal trafficking of heroin.

It seems that every time they sit down to eat, an ever more bizarre outside intervention takes place before they can put the food to their lips. Much later Bunuel interjects into the narrative the dreams of a young French army officer who just happens along and then the daydreams of the lead characters themselves some of which in fact overlap the dreams of the others. Some of these are eerie, while others are comical.

If pushed, yes I can see the film attacking the governing elite, here shown as corrupt and without morals, but it's more the individual scenes that stay in the memory such as the shocking sequence when the local bishop, who joins the group, oddly enough as a gardener, later cold-bloodedly shoots dead an already dying man after he learns that years ago the man was the never-caught killer of his own parents or when the six are slaughtered Romanov-style by presumably Miranda freedom-fighters near the end.

But I also love the comic touches like when the group discover themselves playing themselves on stage in front of a baying audience, or when an important telephone conversation is drowned out by the sound of aircraft flying overhead in an almost Woody Allen-type moment. The funniest of many in the film for me was the sight of Ray's character giving himself away to the Miranda assassins by reaching up to the table under which he is concealed for a piece of duck he's waited all movie-long to taste.

Listen, don't ask me to write an essay on this film. All I know is that I found it very original, entertaining and funny in equal measure. A moveable feast in fact.

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

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")