Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
(The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972)
Luis Buñuel
France, Italy, Spain
102 min, color, French and Spanish (English subtitles)
Neither discreet nor particularly charming, Bunuel's 1972 film has to be one of the most overrated films of the last century. It may have had the subtle anti-establishment punch when released during the Vietnam war but most of the antics and the not so subtle message are at most amusing anachronisms today and at worst an exercise in self-induglence by the famed director.
The idea is simple: six bored pretentious and amoral bourgeois continually attempt to have dinner or lunch only to have each attempt thwarted by various external or internal intrusions. At first, the four guests arrive only to find out that the invitation is for the next day. Then they go off to a restaurant only to leave upon discovering a wake for the owner in the adjacent room. When he is not busy creating comic diversions, Bunuel reaches for the absurd: when the three women are waiting for their tea and coffee (which never arrive) a glum leutenant joins them to recount a rather gruesome tale from his childhood and then abruptly leaves. Or when they finally sit with a bunch of military officers during maneuvers, a sargeant who had come to deliver a message narrates one of his obsessive dreams.
The film undulates between reality, dreams, and dreams within dreams as the characters unwittingly expose the shallow structure behind the fragile facade of bourgois propriety. During a particularly good sequence, the dinner guests find themselves on stage, and when most embarrassingly leave under the boos of the audience, one remains behind sweating and mutterring to himself that he has forgotten his lines. Everything in this world is an act and every member of this class is the consummate actor.
Lurking behind the jovial exterior are rather mundane human sins, like lust, gluttony, adultery, and alcoholism. The suave and charming ambassador of "Republic of Miranda" is also a drug trafficker, and when he is not busy shooting at a girl terrorist's puppet toys, he is busy with his partner's wife. The self-consciousness extends even to the most intimate places. A couple cannot make love while the guests are in the house because the husband is worried that his wife "makes too much noise" and so they steal away to the garden for a roll in the hay. During one of the ambassador's trysts with his partner's wife, she is unable to have sex with him with the light on because some unspecified illness has presumably made her less presentable without her clothes on.
All the pretense is exposed and their meaningless existence is revealed in perhaps one of the most memorable sequences in the film (it is repeated several times throughout): The six walk down a barren stretch of road. They come from nowhere and are going nowhere, but still do so with brisk and light pace, never dispensing with the illusion that gives a sembalnce of purpose to their lives.
All this is fine and good but today Bunuel's film lacks charisma and power. There are two reasons for this: lack of subtlety and lack of relevance. The first is evident from the very beginning. When discussing the proper way to prepare and sip martini, the characters invite the chauffeur to a drink only to demonstrate that the poor brute gulps it all at once instead of "sipping it like champagne." After the demonstration, the chauffeur is dismissed and with two superficial but disdainful comments about the lack of education, the matter is forgotten. Although not necessarily fatal, this flaw detracts quite a bit from the "discreet" part.
The second problem, on the other hand, is fatal and it is not the director's fault. Times have changed. The upper class today is still dependent on ritual, role-playing, and hypocrisy, as it will always be in "polite society". However, it is perhaps not the object of bitter scrutiny as it once was. The middle class is a better target and even though it has its own set of rule for propriety and correctness, they are not how one should drink his martini. This lack of relevance makes most of the social critique offered by Bunual inapplicable. Although the anachronistic may hold a certain charm for moviegoers, it will fail to attract in the way it probably did once.
Finally, whatever may be said of him, Bunuel just isn't a very good director. Apart from the zooms and unfocusing technique (really irritating, old, and a hallmark feature of cheap B movies), his placement of people is static, strained, and boring. Not everyone, of course, is Kurosawa who could deliver over 30 minutes of the film set in one room without the audience realizing it, but one does not have to be, especially since there is ample opportunity for change in Bunuel's settings.
The Criterion special 2-disc edition of the film is very good, as one would expect. The 1:66 anamorphic transfer is crisp and clean, and the new (and improved) subtitles are also good. There is an old (1970) documentary on Bunuel filmed by two of his friends, and a longer, 98-minute, feature on the director produced in 2000.
May 25, 2002, BLS