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July 6–13, 2000

movie shorts

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

recommended

Both vicious in intent and light in tone, Discreet Charm is an old man’s satire, patient in its rightness and unswerving in its targets. Made when Luis Buñuel was 72, the 1972 movie (re-released and re-subtitled) is laconically brutal. Though you’re unlikely to find a less sympathetic gathering of characters anywhere, Buñuel gives the movie a dreamlike gloss; he makes his points, but he glides past them so fast you hardly notice. He directs like a cross between Fred Astaire and Karl Marx. The film’s plot mostly concerns a half-dozen wealthy Parisians — including the great Fernando Rey — and their ever-more-fervid attempts to sit down for a successful meal. Once, a dinner at a country inn is interrupted by the discovery that a dead man is lying in state in the back room; once a dinner party is derailed when the local army arrives for maneuvers and insists on being fed. But much of the action has little or nothing to do with class politics: a soldier arrives for lunch and insists on telling the story of how he poisoned his father for murdering his mother; the soldiers halt their meal to listen to a messenger’s "charming dream." The connection between all these incidents is subtle and sometimes elusive, but Buñuel’s dreamlike tone allows you to put rationality aside, and merely drift on the wave of his vision.

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