Delphine Seyrig and Fernando Rey are guests at a series of surreal dinner parties in Luís Buñuei’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE.


sit down to an evening dinner and enjoy its attendant conver­ sation. Don Rafael (Fernando Rey), Ambassador to the (mythi­ cal) country of Miranda, and his mistress, Mme. Thévenot (Delp­ hine Seyrig), along with Mme. Thévenot’s alcoholic sister, Flo­ rence (Bulle Ogier) arrive at their friends’ home to have a dinner party. To their dismay, the host­ ess, Mme. Sénéchal (Stephane Audran), informs them that they have called on the wrong night, and that M. Sénéchal (Jean- Pierre Cassel) is not at home. After the appropriate apologies, the group decides to go out for dinner at a local restaurant, where their meal preparations are interrupted by the employees’ mourning over the restaurant owner’s corpse. When next Don Rafael and his entourage arrive, the Sénéchals have become overwhelmed by lust. Since Mme. Sénéchal is a vocal lovemaker, the bedroom is ruled out, so the couple climbs out a window to


have sex behind some bushes... and so it goes. The narrative is perpetually interrupted and there are frequent digressions as a character tells another about a dream, or wakes up from a dream (dispelling the narrative which has come before) or, dur­ ing one disorienting moment, the diners discover the all the food on the table is in fact stage- props, only to have the curtain suddenly come up as they real­ ize that they’ve all forgotten their lines. Winner of the 1972 Acad­


emy Award for Best Foreign Film, THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE— is­ sued by Criterion in a deluxe double disc edition to com­ memorate the 100th anniver­ sary of its director’s birth— represents the late great Luis Buñuel at his subversive best. Criterion has packaged the film with a valuable second disc containing an excellent 99m 8s documentary on Buñuel, A


Proposito de Buñuel (“Speaking of Buñuel”), that is an enormous contribution to our understand­ ing of the au te u rs films, espe­ cially DISCREET CHARM. The documentary suggests that there is not surrealism, but “surreal­ isms,” contrasting French surre­ alism with Spanish surrealism, of which Buñuel was, naturally, a practitioner of the latter. Behind Spanish surrealism is a rich Spanish culture composed of artists such as Goya, Ramón del Valle Inclán, Cervantes, the picaresque, and St. John of the Cross. José Bello, a lifelong friend of Buñuel’s, says that when Buñuel first arrived in Madrid, Ramón Goméz de la Serna (sim­ ply known as Ramón) was a great figure, the father of the avant- garde, who greatly influenced the young Buñuel. It is observed that Buñuel’s films are Ramónian “in the sense of being a series of linked gags”—a precise descrip­ tion of the repeated narrative ruptures of DISCREET CHARM.


59

Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84