Luis Bunuel
Il Fascino Discreto Della Borghesia

BOURGEOISIE MON AMOUR

Six characters in search of an author continue to walk, with a determined step, along a desolate country road. Headstrong and contrary to the repetitive cycle of a ritual as simple as it is complicated: taking a seat at the table and consuming the courses in sacred peace. Ambassador Don Rafael (the fetish actor Fernando Rey), the Thévenot couple, and young Florence have a dinner appointment at the villa of the Sénécal couple. The invitation was for the following evening, so the amiable rogues stoically head to the nearest tavern. Greeted by a funeral wake, they leave: everything is wrong, everything must be redone. But Buñuel's representation of interrupted acts and dishes dissolves into utopia, and the gastronomic ritual remains suspended between dream and reality, personal excesses, and superficial respectability. Luis Buñuel, as an old iconoclastic anarchist, uses allegory with the wise and crystal-clear detachment of one who now looks at this sick world from the moon. And he contrasts symbolism, often obscure and indecipherable, with the allegorical meaning (clear and not at all convoluted) of his visionary surrealism. In the grotesque progress of events, which repeatedly prevent the bourgeois group from reaching the desired dinner (erotic raptures, a battalion of soldiers, plastic chickens), the Spanish master strips away the rules of the plausible, of spatio-temporal progression, in a oneiric and fantastical crescendo that unites Karl Marx with Freud.

"You think I'm a scoundrel, don't you? I could also be a socialist if socialists believed in God."

The exhausting attempt of the two families to finish a meal, even when the diners seem about to succeed, is clamorously interrupted by someone or something; and along with the deep cracks of bourgeois society, Buñuel's fierce eye shatters one by one its powerful pillars: political power, the Church, the police, and the army. Through an ironic and light gaze, all the mechanisms and clichés of comedy are demolished, including the class that created it. A key scene is the dream/nightmare at the colonel's house, with fake food and the room revealing itself as the theatrical set where the six characters are forced to always perform the same comedic act. Buñuel makes the ambiguous alternation of magic-realism plausible, especially through gestures and daily interpretations, avoiding replicating the surrounding reality but preserving its essential idea. In fact, when the army bursts in and sits harmlessly at the table, with the bourgeoisie and clergy, it's just old friends and historical allies gathering. Until armed gangsters enter the dining room and kill everyone just as the tasty courses are announced: here are the bourgeois nightmares, dying while satisfying the hunger for consumerism. A funny and worthy way to end a film.

Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, shot in France in 1972, managed to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay (the 72-year-old Buñuel's fourth collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière, after Belle de Jour and The Milky Way). Besides the bearded Rey, the cast features the minister Michel Piccoli, the buddies Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Stéphane Audran, and the young maid Milena Vukotic. The established class balance disintegrates, someone has peed on the Chateau d'Ax in the living room, and merrily scratched the blue side of your German family car parked on the avenue. Meanwhile, six characters in search of an author continue to walk, with a determined step, along a desolate country road.