The Not So Discreet Charm-Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell 

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, Luis Bunuel, 1972  

 

Back in the day, back in the later part of the 1960s, early 1970s anybody who was involved in any aspect of the counter-cultural movement that animated “youth nation” in this country and abroad had to have some kind of critique of late capitalist society, of the thing that previous generations had built from which we had to run, and run like hell, That critique could go from high Leninist assaults on economic imperialism to a soft-shell lambasting of bourgeois manners and norms from cultural anarchists to cultural Marxists (mainly through small press journals and magazines where such material appealed to the academy). Into that mix any manifestation by film, book or song of such critiques drew immediate attention from some segments of youth nation such as the film under review, Luis Bunuel’s Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie. This one was like catnip for those who needed a visual representation of what was wrong with capitalist society in the raw.      

Of course Bunuel was an old hand at such critiques. He was old man at the time of this film but in his youth and in his earlier works very much drawn to the Surrealists and Dadaists and it showed in this film as well especially the dream sequels which dominate this award-winning effort. In fact the dreams, or rather nightmares, of the bourgeoisie get quite a sent up here. The basic plotline is pretty standard critique of the affluent and their allegedly superior manners and tastes. A small group of Parisian Mayfair swells which expanded (mostly) and contracted depending on the scene are connected together through trying to break bread, trying to eat together which through might and main does not get accomplished. Something always got in the way from the beginning starting with a wrong date for dinner to a restaurant being used as a funeral parlor after the death of the owner to the French military showing up to do practice exercises and so on.      

Of course this group of bourgeois are also tied together by the men, one an ambassador from a fictitious country in South America, who are making a ton of money running a drug smuggling operation through using his diplomatic immunity as cover. This operation and its possible discovery has then on edge (they are eventually arrested but are let go to avoid an international incident). Has them having dreams turned to nightmares involving getting caught, being murdered and other combinations including a couple being characters in each other’s dream. Of course standard for such an anti-establishment 1972 film there were references to Chairman Mao, guerrilla warfare, terrorists and every other dread that the bourgeois elements lived through in those times. At the end (and also interspersed throughout the film) the six main characters are seen walking, walking on a deserted road to someplace, no place, any place. Whatever Bunuel had in mind for his characters by this piece of symbolism they need not have worried about their futures since this period was the ebb tide of the big changes that “youth nation” expected to bring unto the world. Straight up, they won, we lost and have been fighting a rearguard action ever since. Enough said.