The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

(Luis Buñuel, France, 1972)

More and Less

The first odd thing about Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie happens just five minutes in.

Four people, Rafael (Fernando Rey), François (Paul Frankeur), Florence (Bulle Ogier) and Simone (Delphine Seyrig) have arrived for dinner at the stately home of Alice (Stéphane Audran) and Henri (Jean-Pierre Cassel) Sénéchal. But Rafael has scrambled the details of the invitation: it was for the following evening. A new plan is improvised: in Henri’s absence, the five of them will go to a nearby restaurant. Alice is about to go upstairs and change her clothes when Simone coolly advises: “Come as you are”. So Alice heads out into the darkness in her nightclothes, covered only with a fur coat!

Nobody in the film finds this detail odd, or comments on it further. Indeed, it may also quickly slip the mind of the film’s spectators. When I quiz friends about the movie, few can recollect its many small, slightly off touches. Like the strange moments when characters suddenly give penetrating or mysterious glances at each other. Or Florence’s excessive distaste over the somewhat obscene gesture of a cellist’s finger vibrating a string (“Most orchestras have dropped them”, she states). Or the sudden shot, right in the middle of a narrated, patently artificial dream sequence, of a clothed body (one hand clasping a crucifix) being covered in dirt.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is, in fact, a great film to revisit every few years – since it seems impossible for anyone to fully hold it in their head. People, in their recollections and writings on the film, regularly mix up the order of its block-like sequences, or mess up the labyrinthine logic of its dream-within-a-dream drifts. (One veteran critic remembers the totality of its narrative as unfolding “during one night”!) Not to mention also superimposing or substituting scenes from Buñuel’s two subsequent films, The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

Why should this be the case – and why for this film much more than for most? It surely has something to do with the serene, hyper-elegant flow of Buñuel’s late work, beginning at Belle de jour (1967) – how one event, one mood, one genre so calmly transits into another, without announcement or ostentation. Reality gradually becomes wild dream and then, in the blink of a cut, returns to banal reality. Viewers tend to recall the striking incidents – murders and corpses, cockroaches on piano keys, the impulsive detour of Alice and Henri into their garden for a little sex – and forget all the in-between, mundane, unspectacular stuff. But, as Raymond Durgnat once suggested, the memorable moments are inevitably “flanked by everything which is shallow or arbitrary in everyday sociability” – like going out to dine in your pajamas. Even the craziest incident is thus grounded in mundanity.

What is The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie about? It is a film in which not even the simplest goal – in this case, sitting down to eat a meal together – can reach its fulfilment. Something always interferes. Complications of every kind – crossed-wires as to the date of an appointment, the appearance of a corpse in a restaurant, a soldier spontaneously telling a tale at lunchtime – keep piling up, and the characters must move on, in search of their elusive nourishment. The more this simple plot device repeats, the more it renders proceedings patently absurd and dreamlike.

Meanwhile, as the polite façade of normality slowly cracks apart, other human desires, beyond the need for food, gradually assert themselves, taking over the narrative: acts of impulsive sex, and equally impulsive murder, for instance. The film becomes increasingly outrageous, scandalous, even blasphemous, while, on its surface, remaining perfectly cool and in control: that combination was a Buñuel speciality, achieved with a renewed cheek and assurance here.

Discreet Charm boasts a wonderful, zig-zagging structure, devised by Buñuel in collaboration with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, his creative interlocutor since Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964 and all the way to the end of his life. The film is episodic, leaping freely from one vignette to another, like The Milky Way (1969) and The Phantom of Liberty, while at the same time restricting its purview, at least nominally, to the comings and goings of its six central characters. Within this fan-like plot pattern, there is always room left open for surreal, wandering digressions. Anybody who walks into a scene may be liable to take the story off in a new, different direction.

Buñuel is, as everyone knows, a Surrealist poet of the unconscious mind. But his special vision of the unconscious is rarely focused on individuals and their solitary, subjective experiences. Rather, he loved to stage interactions, group scenes, small communities (the extreme point of this being The Exterminating Angel in 1962, with its dozens of characters unable to leave a room – the exact inverse of the Discreet Charm situation, where nobody can find a dining room to settle in).

The totality of daily life is a shared dream in Buñuel – a very weird kind of dream, marvellous and banal in equal measure. And if there are actual dreams experienced by the characters, these personal visions become social the instant they are related to listeners (the public recounting of dreams becomes even a military ritual in one scene); there is a very thin line between storytelling and dream-telling in Buñuel.

Discreet Charm thus creates a fluid continuum where we pass from ordinary reality, via slightly odd details, to an immersion in unconscious fantasy – sometimes literally in the blink of an eye, or a fast zoom of the camera lens (one such transition takes us into the Bishop [Julien Bertheau] living out his fantasy of becoming a gardener). And this flexibly oneiric world tends to follow the viciously circular logic identified by Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier: “Obstacles create frustration, frustration prompts dreams, and the dreams repeat the obstacles”.

The story goes that Buñuel, at age 70, considered his great career complete with Tristana in 1970. But a chance inspiration, and the opportunity provided by his regular French producer Serge Silberman, led him to enthusiastically concoct the script of Discreet Charm over the course of just several weeks. I feel certain that Buñuel was an artist who worked the way Alfred Hitchcock did with his legendary filing cabinet of accumulated notes and notions; even if that cabinet was only in Buñuel’s brain, he must have dug deep to dredge up so many fertile ideas for the situations here.

Part of the richness of Discreet Charm lies in the way it so effortlessly interweaves themes and motifs (clergy, insects, middle-class professionals … ) from his entire filmography, while reinventing them in the process. Carrière has testified to the manner in which he and the director free-associated Discreet Charm together, using the “muscle of the imagination”, daring each other to go further than they ever had before.

Buñuel certainly gives new meaning to the genre tag comedy of manners. Everything here begins from eating – the social ritual of sharing a meal. Hence all the discussion of wine, cooking, taste, flavour and the proper way to behave à table – like in Claude Chabrol’s films, with which Discreet Charm displays many affinities (beginning with Stéphane Audran, married to Chabrol at the time, as well as Cassel and Michel Piccoli). Except that, as it happens, Buñuel’s characters never get very far into actually swallowing or digesting anything. Like in the equally black comedies of Roy Andersson (who cites Buñuel among his major influences), it’s when the social codes of behaviour are somehow jammed or suspended that the most remarkable things really start happening.

Buñuel’s fascination with the discreet charms of these bourgeoisie is twofold. On the one hand, their ultra-polite, elegant civilisation hides, or even nurtures, impressive acts of savagery and criminality. A Bishop commits murder, high-ranking government officials smuggle drugs and remain immune to the law, soldiers smoke pot, dissidents are cruelly tortured. This complicated interplay of normality and transgression is taken for granted by Buñuel as the status quo, just the way things are in the rotten, modern world.

But he also delights in showing how, on the other hand, that balance can so easily come unstuck. Too many embarrassing or needling questions from a Colonel (Claude Piéplu) to Don Rafael about the politics of “Miranda” (the country he represents as Ambassador) lead to a deadly duel right in the midst of a reception.

Discretion gives way to flagrant indiscretion whenever it is a question of the most basic human appetites – hunger or lust – forcing their way into the foreground of a situation. A couple’s itch for amour fou leads to the abandonment of assembled guests; while the compulsion to chomp on a decent piece of meat gives Rafael away just when he should be hiding from a terrorist’s machine gun. I have already compared Buñuel to Hitchcock; not only did they admire each other’s work, but the synchronicity between Discreet Charm and Hitch’s Frenzy, another film about food, social manners and transgressive violence released that same year, is quite uncanny.

The dream-state is social in Discreet Charm but also – as in all the director’s final, 1970s works – historical and political. A running gag covers up the “incriminating” evidence of named names with outrageous sound effects (especially credited to LB himself!), as if the film has already been worked over by government censors.

More acutely, Buñuel became fascinated by the growing phenomenon of global terrorism in the 1970s, both for its gestures of romantic anarchy (Buñuel’s own preferred rhetoric in his youth), and for its disturbing ambiguity: too often simply a mirror of the violence of the State itself, and corrupted from within by sabotage or plain human whimsy.

Hence, the dreams and nightmares of the bourgeoisie naturally include kidnappings, assassinations, torture – an entire theatre of mass death writ large. In fact, death figures, in one way or another, in every single vignette of Discreet Charm. Silberman recalls: “For Buñuel – for many – death is an obsession”.

Some insensitive critics have had the temerity to suggest that Buñuel finally developed a flair for cinematic form and style only in his mid 60s. What nonsense! His immense art and craft as a director was well in place by, at least, the early 1950s. But you will read literally hundreds of pages of profound, scholarly/academic decoding of the symbols and metaphors in Discreet Charm without encountering a single mention of its camera movements – even as the work of Edmond Richard as DOP (who had collaborated with Orson Welles during the 1960s), and the way it is integrated with the director’s staging, is consistently astonishing.

Why this critical neglect in the face of the style of a master? Buñuel was always a director who relied on speed and economy – paradoxically allying this natural-born Surrealist with the most classical filmmakers of Hollywood like Howard Hawks or Raoul Walsh. Things happen quickly, no moment is wasted, and the transitions into and out of scenes are always lively in Discreet Charm. Moreover, the film’s fluidity is clinched in a constant interweaving of foreground and background spaces, with the actors darting this way and that (keep a close eye on Milena Vukotic as the Sénéchals’ maid). Each well-placed cut within a scene prepares the ground for a redrawn choreography of bodies.

In her 2019 autobiography J’ai oublié (“I’ve forgotten”), Bulle Ogier recalls the joy of this shoot on which “we never stopped laughing” – while also noting that, like Jacques Rivette or Manoel de Oliveira, Don Luis (“no one ever addressed him as Luis”) could easily suspend a day or two of filming in order to mull over and work on a scene with the actors.

Ogier describes the famous, open-ended sequence of the six central characters walking “along a flat, country road” as one that was in neither the script nor the shooting schedule; “It came to his mind during filming”. Buñuel placed these shots at strategic intervals of the film, evoking a mini-narrative that mirrors the larger structure: at first, 29 minutes in, the characters stroll calmly in the sunshine; 44 minutes later, the light is darker and the group behaviour is harried, distracted; and at the very end, before the camera adopts a distant view, before the image blurs out and the credits roll, everyone seems somewhat troubled but ultimately resigned to their eternal lot of walking, walking – with no end in sight.

For Ogier, this sequence, “perhaps the most symbolic in the film”, expressed a very particular aspect of Buñuel’s creativity. For, although these characters were “precisely delineated” on the page, Buñuel loved also to film the “more and less” of them. What does this mean? Ogier herself states that, frequently in her career, not entirely understanding her role leads productively to the generation of a character who “takes different forms and incarnates different energies” across the duration of a film.

Buñuel’s case is paradoxical. He begins, essentially, from stereotypes (the Bishop, the politician, the servant, the farmer … ) that he treats satirically or tenderly. But then the type, as it were, floats. These figures commit acts that are out of character (the Bishop picks up a rifle and kills the man he just absolved). Potential intrigues are hinted at but never flower into storylines – as with the unforgettable woman (Muni, a Buñuel regular) who declares her hatred for Jesus Christ, or Ogier’s own flighty character of Florence, whose bouts of drunkenness and instability (her neuroses include, as she begins to tell us, “Euclid’s Complex”) do not generate any specific melodrama.

Above all, the relationships between characters are never given to us all at once, in an opening exposition, as most directors would routinely do: it takes a good while for the film to definitively establish that Florence and Simone are sisters, that François and Simone are married, and that Rafael and Simone are having an affair. On this level, too, the characters float, are never entirely there.

And then there are the bodies, the presences and personalities of the actors themselves. Buñuel was a true connoisseur at knowing how and when to bring the actor more to the foreground than their fictive role. It is, again, a fluidly modulated game. On that road to nowhere, we might feel we are watching the actors themselves searching for their characters – and for the resolution to their maddening, stop-start adventure.

This sinuously reflexive game finds its dizzy apotheosis in the brilliant scene that Ogier claims still haunts her actorly dreams at age 80: when the characters, sitting down to dinner, find that the chickens are plastic, the soft drink is “Quasi-Cola”, that the hitherto unseen “fourth wall” is a curtain in the process of parting, and that they are now on a stage in front of an expectant audience, being prompted to speak lines they do not know … (Ropars-Wuilleumier identifies the fragment of theatrical dialogue as an allusion to the plot of Don Juan, in which the ghost of a Commander, who has been killed in a duel, shows up for dinner!)

More and less: the same fine, Buñuelian principle goes for the film as a whole, on the level of its themes and meanings. As his best critics have observed, Buñuel multiples the clues and keys to interpretation – dead mother-figures, hints of an allegory of Spain, allusions to the Marquis de Sade – in order, finally, to cancel out any “single, knockdown, logically demonstrable meaning” (Durgnat). Buñuel publicly savoured the irony that he was an atheist who “thanked God”, and a bourgeois who roasted the bourgeoisie.

This could be taken as the sign of a new mellowness, a late style in the ageing Buñuel; we seem to be far, now, from the corrosive anger of Viridiana (1961) or even Tristana.

But don’t be fooled: Discreet Charm is a film that ceaselessly deconstructs itself while constructing itself. In its uniquely dazzling and delightful way, it plumbs the resonant depths of what screenwriting guru Yvette Bíró rightly calls “the sacrilegious enterprise of good storytelling”.

MORE Buñuel: Un Chien andalou, Abismos de pasión

© Adrian Martin July/September 2020