Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie

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1972 Comedy / Drama / Fantasy

Credits

Director: Luis Buñuel
Script: Luis Buñuel et Julio Alejandro
Photo: Edmond Richard
Cast: Fernando Rey (Don Rafael), Paul Frankeur (M. Thevenot), Delphine Seyrig (Mme Thevenot), Bulle Ogier (Florence), Stéphane Audran (Alice Senechal), Jean-Pierre Cassel (M. Senechal), Julien Bertheau (Mgr Dufour), Milena Vukotic (Ines), Maria Gabriella Maione (Guerilla), Claude Piéplu (Colonel), Muni (Peasant), Pierre Maguelon (Sgt de police), François Maistre (Delecluze), Michel Piccoli (Ministre)
Country: France
Language: French
Runtime: 102 min
Aka: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Summary

A group of middle-class friends try to get together for a dinner party, but their attempts are constantly thwarted. First, the guests arrive a day early at their friends’ house. They go off to a restaurant, but are put off when they see a corpse laid out in an adjoining room. The next time, the guests arrive, but the hosts are making love in the garden. Suspecting that they have entered a police trap (since they are involved in drug smuggling), the guests make a hurried departure. The next dinner date is disturbed my army manoeuvres, and so it continues, with increasing surrealism.

Review

This is a totally off the wall but brilliantly funny comment on bourgeois life in France of the early 1970s. As in his earlier film, Belle du jour, director Luis Bunuel mingles reality and fantasy to the point that, in the end, we cannot distinguish the two. Using Russian doll-like dreams within dreams and surreal, often disturbing, vignettes, Bunuel takes great pleasure in mocking the superficiality and insensitivity of bourgeois attitudes. The result is a film that is ceaselessly unpredictable, outrageously funny, and compelling viewing.

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