(LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE, Luis Buñuel, France/Italy/Spain 1972, 102 min., French with subtitles, 35mm)
Polite society friends attempt to gather for a dinner party but find themselves curiously incapable of convening. Through spartan direction, the visionary Buñuel led his cast and crew toward the most profoundly surreal film of his career.
Program Notes
Luis Buñuel was 72 when he made The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and had sometimes been known as the cruelest of all directors. An adept student of psychology, he had aimed images at audiences that were like barbed arrows searching out the Achilles heel of the mind, pictures so intentionally wounding, such as the slit eye ball of Buñuel’s first film Un Chien Andalou, that once seen, viewers could not get them out of their most tender mental recesses. Yet Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of Discreet Charm was full of phrases like “an Old Master’s mischief” and “a special enchantment.” And, in fact, as Kael’s own imagery suggests, this film seems to be a bit of a surrealist Tempest, with Buñuel as Prospero and the bourgeoisie as his Caliban.
Born in 1900 in southern Spain, the young Buñuel had abandoned his conservative Catholic upbringing to devote himself to the radical surrealist movement and to sympathize with Communist causes. By middle age, however, he had concluded that Communism was not going to make good on its promises. And, furthermore, reflecting on the ambitions of his beloved surrealism, the older Buñuel wrote that, while the aim of drawing out and legitimizing the unconscious mind had been nothing less than “to change the world, to transform life itself,” he added that “today we see the place of surrealism in the world as infinitesimal.”
So how did Buñuel ultimately digest what even he called a failure of all he had once believed in? The answer, at least as shown in Discreet Charm, seems to be with good humor, a certain mellowness and the mirthful inclusion of his recipe for a dry martini. Clearly, even if left-wing political thinking and the surrealist insights into the subconscious mind never delivered what Buñuel once hoped they would, he was able to take this disappointment in stride and still anchor himself in these points of view. The Discreet Charm continued his favorite Freudian and leftist themes, but dealt with them in a very discreetly charming manner.
Buñuel frequently rejected open interpretations of his films, and consistent with this attitude, denied even that Discreet Charm was a satire about the bourgeoisie; when asked about his favorite characters in the film he replied “the cockroaches.” Like a semper fi surrealist Buñuel spoke from the heart when he said, “All this compulsion to ‘understand’ everything fills me with horror. I love the unexpected more and more the older I get…” However, this film, which on the one hand often seems to make no sense, comic or otherwise, begins to make a great deal of very comic sense when viewed through the lens of dreams. Buñuel thought of film as a means for collective dreaming, and his re-creation of dream logic explored fundamental anxieties, frustrations and fears, generally with great success.
In January 1972 Buñuel had a chance conversation with his producer Serge Silberman in which Silberman told him a story about how he had invited some people for dinner, forgotten about it and gone out elsewhere that night, leaving his wife to face guests at the door in her bathrobe. After that, Buñuel asked Silberman for $2,000, went to Spain, and three weeks later he, and collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, had a first draft of the script. Many of the sequences of the film are in fact based on Buñuel’s own dreams, or on other anecdotes he collected. Buñuel said the notion of a dream-within-a-dream was important in informing successive revisions of the script.
Once Buñuel received the go-ahead from Silberman in April 1972, the seasoned director was his usual on-time, within-budget self that many lean years of filmmaking had made him. He proceeded to finish shooting in six weeks, coming in under the $800,000 allotment. The director said he edited the film in a day; Silberman said it was a day and a half.
The film was an immediate critical and commercial success. Silberman had timed the American release to allow the film to qualify for consideration for the 1972 Academy Awards. Despite high jinx by Buñuel – he made an unfortunate joke about having paid the requisite bribe – Discreet Charm did win an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Buñuel left his producer to collect the statuette, and when the Academy insisted on a photograph, the perennially contrarian director wore a wig and dark glasses. After all, as Buñuel once told his scriptwriter, “a day without laughter is a day lost.”
~Alexandra Terziev, Motion Picture Department volunteer
