“An upper-class sextet (Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Cassel) sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts repeatedly thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.”
This is Netflix’s plot description of Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” which I didn’t even read ahead of time. The film is deliciously bizarre and mind-blowingly obtuse without any real sense of a plot. I wondered if Netflix could fill in the holes for me in a cohesive way I could not, although at the end of the day the concept is so wonderfully simple that I would have had no trouble telling you precisely what Netflix had said.
Think about Bunuel’s film for a second: If you have watched it but didn’t really get it, was there any moment on screen where you really didn’t know what you were looking at? Every bizarre joke Bunuel plays on these upper class twits is plainly coherent, and his game with the audience is making us wonder if it has any meaning beyond the literal.
One of the film’s best moments comes when the group goes to dinner at an army colonel’s house only to find the food is fake and the table rests on a stage in front of an audience. One character is stunned motionless, and he wakes realizing this was only a dream. “I was on a stage, but I didn’t know the lines,” he says. Neither do we, even though we know exactly where we are.
The bourgeoisie are Bunuel’s targets throughout every surrealist set piece, each of them mindlessly wandering through their lives with an entitled sense of direction and with nowhere to go. Bunuel literally calls attention to this by showing us all six of them doing just that down an empty road in the country.
And yet Bunuel’s talents as a filmmaker come in blurring the line between reality and fiction. At a certain point when the nightmares haunting these characters are quite literally dreams within dreams (“Inception,” anyone?), we begin to question everything we’ve seen until that point. Every time you can begin to grasp a sense of a running plot or a character motivation, something comes out of left field to disrupt that train of thought.
Don Raphael Acosta (Fernando Rey) is the ambassador to a fake European country, and we learn he’s having an affair with one of his friends’ wives. The moment is interrupted by the husband himself, who is even then blindly unaware, and the story diverts to another theme of a sexy, hippie protestor aiming to assassinate the ambassador. When her voice is blared out by a pair of plane engines, we realize lower class people have no voice in the proletariat. But even that hardly fits when in just the next scene an entire platoon practicing war games invades the bourgeoisie dinner party with stories and pot smoking.
Bunuel relishes in stringing us along, and it is this ambition more so than adding punchlines to his screwball scenarios that he’s interested in. Each set piece is so wild and yet addressed so dryly, and we watch with almost perverse fascination more than gleeful irreverence.
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” was Bunuel’s most successful film. In 1972 it won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, earned a screenplay nomination and was also a box office hit, or at least as much as a foreign surrealist film can be a hit. And yet the film is not too far away from his infamous short film he made at the very start of his career with Salvador Dali, 1928’s “Un Chien Andalou.” That short film too is a string of insane set pieces that are not visually nonsensical but play with our minds in ways we cannot process. In both films’ collections of all of these horrific dreams, some are sadistic, some are serene and some are surreal, but all of them display a level of remarkable imagination that is still unmatched.