Discreet Charm<\/em> was the most financially and critically successful of those films, winning the Oscar for best foreign film of 1972 (and nabbing a screenplay nomination) and the prize for the year\u2019s best film from the National Society of Film Critics. Viewed now, within this group of titles and the filmography as a whole, it stands as perhaps his quintessential work, the one that best summarizes the themes and worldview that would preoccupy him throughout his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plot is somehow simple while simultaneously defying explanation. The bourgeoisie of the title are a group of friends, spouses, and lovers in the circle of Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey), the ambassador to the Latin American republic of Miranda. The picture opens with the group arriving for a dinner party that isn\u2019t going to happen \u2013 there was confusion about the date. So they head off to a restaurant instead, where they complain about the menu and the d\u00e9cor (\u201cCheap food, no customers, makes me nervous\u201d) before discovering the corpse in the next room, laying in state. They hurry off; they\u2019ll eat together some other time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the rough outline of the rest of the film \u2013 these rich friends trying, and failing, to dine together, consistently interrupted by outside forces or their own incompetence, a kind of continuous coitus interruptus<\/em>, but for food (though sex is frequently interrupted as well). It doesn\u2019t take long to discover that, for all of their fancy airs and high incomes, these society types are just as animalistic as the rest of us, motivated by greed, drugs, and sex, and constantly in pursuit of one or the other, or all. (They are also, title notwithstanding, not terribly discreet about these activities.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early scenes, the stifling of their bread-breaking is due to slights and overreactions; the longer the picture goes, the loopier the interruptions become (the filmmaker seems intent on topping himself, so the peculiarity has a sense of inevitability), turning into a series of dreams and fantasies, though none seem much stranger than what we\u2019ve already accepted as \u201creal life.\u201d Any summary of the plot \u2013 such as it is \u2013 risks devolving into a series of spoiled jokes; the laughs come from the sheer surreal silliness, the unexpected turns of events, the circumstances that keep these people from the simple act of eating a meal or even drinking tea, over and over again. And then he turns the knife, so that the laughs render subsequent moments of genuine horror and viciousness all the more upsetting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While he\u2019s stacking up this narrative house of cards, Bu\u00f1uel is simultaneously crafting one of his most technically accomplished works \u2013 he moves the camera with both precision and abandon \u2013 and one of his most formally playful. He takes great delight in building his nonsensical plot to points of exposition, and then slathering over those explanations with wild sound effects (airplanes flying over, passing sirens wailing, etc.), as if to kid us for bothering to care, to look for such fleeting logic. And he indulges in cheerful digressions, spinning off into extended flashbacks for fabulously unimportant characters we\u2019ve met maybe<\/em> thirty seconds earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a sense, in those moments, that he and co-writer Jean-Claude Carri\u00e8re may just be looking to escape from their protagonists \u2013 a phrase that hardly seems adequate for the main characters, since they\u2019re so spectacularly loathsome. And it\u2019s hard to blame them; the well-to-do are indicted with much here, but mostly, and most venomously, for being so frightfully dull<\/em>. They have nothing interesting to say \u2013 it\u2019s all scheduling and chit-chat and bullshit \u2013 and they say all of it as though they\u2019re the most enlightening and entertaining people on the planet, rather than know-nothing blowhards. They\u2019re not even interesting when they\u2019re screwing each other\u2019s wives and smuggling cocaine, and that takes some doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That may be why the film\u2019s \u201ceat le rich\u201d spirit has aged so well, and lands so firmly at this particular moment in time, as our own wealthy politicians sneer at the idea of \u201chanding out\u201d $600 to their citizens, and plead moral offense when asked for more. Writing about the film in 2000, Roger Ebert noted<\/a>, \u201cIt was released in a year when social unrest was at its height, the Vietnam War was in full flower, and the upper middle class was a fashionable target of disdain. How different to see it again in 2000, when affluence is once again praised and envied.\u201d Twenty years later, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie<\/em> again looks wildly of its time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThree<\/em> Films by Luis <\/em>Bu\u00f1uel\u201d is<\/em> <\/em>out now<\/em><\/a> from The Criterion Collection. \u201cThe Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie\u201d is also streaming<\/em> <\/em>on Amazon Prime<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s 1972 Oscar winner (new on Blu-ray from Criterion and streaming on Amazon Prime) remains one of his most savage pictures \u2013 and one of his funniest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":15701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-15698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22615,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15698\/revisions\/22615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/discreet-charm2-1024x658.jpg\")
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