Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

Luis Buñuel (1972)

In Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) the well-heeled guests at a dinner party find that leaving it is easier said than done.  Ten years on, the principals in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie have virtually the opposite problem:  their attempts to eat and drink are repeatedly thwarted.  This surrealist comedy, the most enjoyable Buñuel film that I know, is often, and reasonably, described as playful.  The confounding narrative – the director wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière – sees Buñuel poking fun at his audience as well as at the six characters in search of a square meal.

Five of the six are French:  Alice and Henri Sénéchal (Stéphane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel); their friends, Simone and François Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig and Paul Frankeur); Simone’s sister, Florence (Bulle Ogier).  The exception is Rafael de Acosta (Fernando Rey), the ambassador to France of a fictional South American country called Miranda.  At the Mirandan Embassy in Paris, Acosta meets with François, who’s some kind of colleague, and Henri, some kind of businessman, to discuss the money to be made through a cocaine deal in which they’re all involved.  In the street outside a young woman (Maria Gabriella Maione) is selling clockwork animal toys.  Acosta gets out a gun; he shoots, hits and stops dead one of the toys, explaining that the young woman belongs to a Maoist terrorist group ‘that’s been after me for years’.  The film’s soigné leading ladies don’t work.  Alice, in whose house and garden much of the action takes place, relies mostly on servants to run the place.  Florence, according to her sister, tends to get too drunk to do much else.

The first two of the numerous aborted dinners come in quick succession.  The Thévenots and Acosta arrive at the Sénéchals’ home, only to be told by Alice that she was expecting them the following evening.  Her husband isn’t around but the other five head for a nearby inn.  Although the entrance is locked, a waitress who eventually responds to knocking on the door assures the group the restaurant isn’t closed.  Soon after taking their seats at a table, they hear wailing from an adjoining room and get up to investigate.  They discover a vigil being held beside the corpse of the innkeeper, who died a few hours previously.  The would-be diners make a hasty exit.  By the time that Alice, Simone and Florence meet at a teahouse, later in the film, refreshments are in comically short supply.  A waiter (Bernard Musson) politely informs the women that the place has run out of tea, coffee and milk and doesn’t serve cognac.  He can offer them water, though.

Attempts to have sex are liable to be interrupted too, if not always stymied.  Due to welcome the other four to lunch, a few days after the dinner that never was, Alice and Henri are in the bedroom when their guests arrive.  Ravenously determined to make love, the couple climb out of the window and down the side of the house to avoid being seen, and head for a well-concealed part of the garden.  They do the business there at the expense of the lunch they’re meant to be hosting:  by the time they return, the others are gone, panicked that Henri and Alice have disappeared in order to avoid an impending arrest for drugs trafficking.  Other prospective sexual encounters are stillborn.  Simone is having an affair with Acosta and leaves the teahouse for his apartment.  They’re about to go to bed together when François arrives unexpectedly.  Simone makes her excuses to Acosta and leaves with her unquestioning husband.  When the terrorist girl turns up to kill him, Acosta quickly puts her in her place; when she refuses his sexual advances, the ambassador calls his men to take her away.

Buñuel’s view of formal dining as essential bourgeois performance is eventually explicit in a sequence where the characters are disconcerted to find themselves seated at table on a theatre stage, watched by a large, somewhat fidgety audience.  When this is revealed to be a dream sequence – one of several in the course of the narrative – it has the effect of linking impatience in the theatre stalls with what Buñuel suspects may be  his audience’s fellow feeling.  I had seen and liked The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie twice before – in the 1970s and again around twenty years ago.  I knew there were dream sections yet the film moves so smoothly (the editor was Hélène Piemiannikov) that, even on this third viewing, I kept falling for Buñuel’s legerdemain – believing that what I was seeing was actually happening until the next cut proved otherwise.  The viewer is thus made repeatedly aware of their fundamental expectations of a narrative; so too the listener, through the use of another interruptive device.  With the dialogue on the point of revealing something that could be important to the story, it’s sometimes drowned out by the (deliberately too loud) noise of traffic outside or an aircraft passing overhead.  (The dialogue faces no competition from music, which is almost conspicuous by its absence.)

The ensemble acting is flawless:  the ludicrous elegance – gestural, vocal and sartorial – of Stéphane Audran and Delphine Seyrig; Bulle Ogier’s relative lack of poise which, in the circumstances, verges on subversive; Jean-Pierre Cassel’s effortless comic flair, most beautifully illustrated when Henri discreetly removes a piece of hay from Alice’s hair after the couple’s roll in it and return to their house; Paul Frankeur’s uneasy bonhomie; Fernando Rey’s richly ambiguous suavity.  In the smaller parts, there are fine contributions from, among others, Milena Vukotic, as the Sénéchals’ maid; from Christian Balthauss, as a sincerely melancholy young soldier who regales the main characters with tales of his tragic past; and, especially, from Julien Bertheau, as Monsieur Dufour.  When Alice and Henri first see Dufour on their premises, dressed like a labourer, they brusquely evict him; when he promptly returns in ecclesiastical vestments and explains he’s the bishop of their diocese, it’s a different matter.  The Sénéchals even agree to his request to work as their gardener.  (‘The church has changed, you know.  You’ve heard of worker priests? The same goes for bishops …’)  In due course, Dufour not only reveals a dark backstory but takes lethal revenge on the man who, many years ago, killed his parents – as far as one can tell, this part isn’t a dream.  Whether in gardening togs or bishop’s robes, Julien Bertheau brings to his role a disturbing, mad-eyed gravitas.

At the 1973 Academy Awards The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was named Best Foreign Language Film, landing Buñuel his only Oscar.  While that success is evidence that the film was more palatable to conventional tastes than its predecessors, Buñuel’s reduced aggression isn’t a weakness.  He’s still using surrealism here as a satirical weapon, still skewering the middle classes and the attitudes they represent.  Yet he deploys a different, more relaxed, you might even say classier style – one that may well reflect his own advancing years (he was in his early seventies at the time) and grimly amused recognition that the bourgeoisie will survive him (he died, as old as the century, in 1983).  The most famous image in the film (which was photographed by Edmond Richard) shows, three times, the six main characters walking together down an otherwise deserted country road.  Their progress seems aimless but they remain inanely undaunted.  In the final shot, there’s still a spring in their step.  They’ll carry on regardless.

31 May 2023