The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Art-house drama

DIRECTOR

Luis Buñuel

WRITERS

Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière

STARS

Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel

BEFORE

1929 Luis Buñuel’s first movie, Un Chien Andalou, a short made with Salvador Dalí, is a startling surrealist work.

1962 In Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, guests are unable to leave a dinner.

AFTER

1977 Buñuel’s last movie, That Obscure Object of Desire, is about the frustration of an aging man’s desires for a young Spanish woman.

Luis Buñuel was a master of social satire and the surreal, who had been making movies for nearly half a century by the time he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie). Buñuel took the idea for the movie from an anecdote told by his producer, Serge Silberman, about guests turning up at his home for dinner only to find his wife in her robe and no food, since he had forgotten to tell her he had invited them.

In Buñuel’s earlier movie, The Exterminating Angel (1962), guests at a dinner party are marooned there for weeks, unable to leave without them or us ever knowing why. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Buñuel carries out a droll variation on the theme, as six well-to-do friends attempt to have dinner together but are continually thwarted by a brilliantly unhinged series of mishaps.

At first, the problems are mundane: the hosts were simply expecting the guests to arrive the following day. But soon, a dead body shows up to disrupt the proceedings. Thereafter, flamboyant sexual escapades and the interruption of the army on maneuvers are just some of the obstacles. The movie becomes increasingly surreal, yet shows the guests behaving as if nothing untoward is going on. Buñuel is not remotely concerned with conventional narrative flow. Intercut with the frustrated efforts of the dinner guests are dream sequences that pop from their heads and sometimes overlap with each other, as well as skits involving prop food, flashbacks, and at the center of it all, the ambassador to the Latin American Republic of Miranda (entirely fictional), who finds himself drawn into a bizarre terrorist plot.

“You’re better suited for making love than for making war.”

Rafael Acosta / The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Class and convention

Dinner is the occasion on which the social elite can come together to display their taste, refinement, and material wealth. It assumes a symbolic place far ahead of anything else in these people’s lives. The party’s snobbery and superficiality are continually satirized through the movie as, for instance, the bishop is thrown out when he is mistaken for a mere gardener, then welcomed fawningly when he returns in his episcopal vestments.

In one of the movie’s digressions, a soldier tells how he poisoned his stepfather as the ghosts of his real father and mother looked on.

Road to nowhere

Even as the world crumbles around them and everything begins to fall apart, the six friends are determined to press on with their dinner, and no obstacle, no matter how absurd, will stop them. Throughout the movie, the six are often seen striding purposefully down a seemingly endless road through the countryside, a metaphor for their hollow obsession with status.

Buñuel won the Oscar for best foreign picture for the movie, and many directors acknowledge its influence. Its message about the self-obsession of the well-to-do is as relevant as ever, and the inventiveness of Buñuel’s playful vision remains hugely fun.

The poster for the cinema release had a suitably surrealist design in the style of Belgian painter René Magritte.

Luis Buñuel was celebrated for his surreal movies, biting social satire, and interest in religious fanaticism. He was born in Calanda, Spain, in 1900, and studied as a Jesuit before he met playwright Federico Garcia Lorca and painter Salvador Dalí, with whom he made his first movie, Un Chien Andalou, and a second, L’Age d’Or (1930). Buñuel moved to the US during the Spanish Civil War, then to Mexico, and finally France in 1955. He died in 1983.

1929 Un Chien Andalou

1967 Belle de Jour

1972 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

What else to watch: The Rules of the Game (1939) ✵ Divorce Italian Style (1961) ✵ The Exterminating Angel (1962) ✵ Pierrot le Fou (1965) ✵ Belle de Jour (1967) ✵ The Ruling Class (1972) ✵ Amarcord (1973)