The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie Review

• 29th Jun 2012

Directed by Luis Buñuel, this is one of the Spanish filmmakers most iconic films and is set for a limited theatrical release on 29th June and a DVD release on 16th July. The story is very simplistic and gives the director full reign to his political and Surreal intent: a group of haute-bourgeois friends attempt to meet up for dinner and each time something prevents them. The trick is knowing what is dream and what is ‘reality’. Buñuel never really tamed with age. He was 72-years-old when he made this film and while it is not his most challenging or daring film it does encompass many of the tropes that became emblematic of that career: dream sequences, attacks on high society and the bourgeoisie, the struggles of the poor, attacks on convention and most of all attacks on religion and the ceremony of religion. The most unscrupulous of these characters is Don Rafael Acost (Fernando Rey) who is the Ambassador from a fictitious country called Miranda and is smuggling cocaine into the France (no doubt exploiting the poor in the process). The film opens with several of the friends visiting the home of the Sénéchal’s (Jean Pierre-Cassel and Stephane Audran) for a dinner party only to find that they are a day early and the husband is out. They then go to a restaurant and find the restaurant in the hands of new owners with the body of the proprietor lying in state in an adjoining room. And so the story goes on…

The story and situations are very witty and is filled with witty and shocking surprises like this and contains perhaps some of the master’s wittiest moments. The scene I find the most Buñuelian is where the priest cum gardener (Julien Bertheau) to the Sénéchal’s must attend to the services and last rites of a dying poor man. When he arrives the man confesses before the priest delivers the last rights to a murder he committed many years before – that of the priest’s parents whom he worked for. The priest calmly absolves the dying man, walks over to a shotgun and shoots him dead. Bueñuel loved to play with these attacks of convention ever since his early films. A moment like this would not have been out of place in his first feature, the even more challenging and controversial L’Age d’Or (1930), the second of two films he made with Salvador Dalí. The dreams which unearth the seemingly amoral personalities of the protagonists work are similar manner to those in Belle de Jour (1967) in which we as the audience are not aware that this is a dream sequences until the moment the dreamer awakens. The dream expresses the sub-conscious of the otherwise shallow, vacuous and selfish lives of the bourgeoisie right to the end point when they are all mown down by terrorists and still Don Rafael feels the need to gorge on a fine cut of meat.

It is also important to remember the context of Buñuel’s background and career. He began his career working with fellow Spaniard Salvador Dalí on two films in the exciting milieu of the Paris Surrealist movement before falling out with Dalí. During the Spanish Civil War he exiled himself to Mexico where he made the majority of his films, most of which are rarely viewed these days before going back to Spain in the early sixties and making a couple of films that once again provoked and shocked. His late career had a third phase in which he mostly worked in France which is usually cited as beginning with for my mind his best film, Belle de Jour. It has to be remembered that Buñuel was a director with a Communist background and being a Socialist or a Communist in France meant that observing the bourgeoisie particularly in France opens it up for attack. Part of the challenge is that what might break cinematic or narrative convention and is therefore complex to the viewer comes across as very simplistic for Buñuel, a producer’s dream as he never needed more than a couple of takes for his films.

The film was produced by long term producer of his films, Serge Silberman and was co-written by Buñuel with long term collaborator and partner-in-crime, Jean-Claude Carrière as well as including a strong cast which included other well known names of 1970s French cinema such as Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier and a cameo appearance by Michel Piccoli towards the end. Bunuel’s films are most certainly subversive and anarchic paying little attention to conventional narrative at times and it is great that such an arthouse director’s films are getting the rounds again – his last film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is also set for a DVD/Blu-ray release later in the year.

It will be out on DVD and for the first time on Blu-ray on July 16th. 

Chris Hick