The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
d. Luis Buñuel, 1972
Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a surreal masterpiece. It is made up of several comedic episodes which are because, in most of them, the characters can't sit down to have dinner. The reasons for this range from the reasonable (being late or coming on the wrong night) to the extraodinary (the restaurant owner's dead body being in the next room or the dining room turning into a stage). With all these sequences, Buñuel paints a satire of the bourgois ideals that make up our society. These guidelines, Buñuel suggests, are but a mere way to hide our true feelings and actions.
The characters in The Discreet Charm are for the most part upper class. One of them, played by Buñuel regular Fernando Rey, is the Mirandan ambassador. I'm not quite sure what the other two men and their wives do, as it is never specified in the film. One of the running jokes (along with the main one) is the way most of the interruptions revolve around embarrising bits of information that these characters try to hide. For example, one of the later episodes shows them being arrested by the police for drug trafficking; when confronted about Miranda by a French colonel, the ambassador shoots him.
Some of these scenes are dreams. Buñuel has the courage to admit in this film that he is messing with us, something most movies wouldn't dare doing. By the end, it is difficult to really know what realy happened and what was imagined, but I don't think it matters at all. Ultimately, the statement Buñuel wants to make is introduced early on, and most of the film is him having fun with situations.
Much like Buñuel's next film The Phantom of Liberty, The Discreet Charm's sequences have a certain audacity not seen in many other films, not even ones by directors like David Lynch, who is greatly influenced by Buñuel.
The major scenes in the film are bookmarked by a shot of the main characters walking down a road with no apparent destination. This, I believe, is Buñuel further extending to the audience that this artificial way of life gets you nowhere. Yet, he also suggests throughout the film that these actions are determined not so much by greed and indifference, but by human nature. Buñuel believes that all humans are inherent hypocrites. This, to him, makes us not evil, but funny.
