The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Getting back to Jean-Claude Carriere, his 1972 collaboration with Luis Bunuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, may well be their apotheosis. It received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and is a classic of surreal cinema. I first saw it way back in college, and don't remember what I thought of it then, but watching it this time I could see why it is so  well thought of.

The "joke" of the film is that six members of the upper class are always stymied in their attempts to have a meal. The film begins with a foursome, including the ambassador to the fictional Latin-American country Miranda (Fernando Rey) arriving at a house for dinner. The woman at home (Stephane Audran) wonders why they are there. The dates have been mixed up, so the five travel to a nearby inn, where they are the only customers. They soon find that the owner has died, and he's been laid out in a nearby room.

And so it goes. Some of the meals turn out to be dreams, such as the one where the participants find themselves on stage, and don't know their lines. We also get some out of leftfield stories thrown in. When the three women are at a cafe (that has run out of tea, coffee, and milk) a young soldier asks if he can sit down and tells them the story of how when he was a young boy about to go to military school his mother appeared to him as a ghost and told him the man he thought he was his father is not, and to please poison him to death. The women don't seem to react to this story at all.

While this film is very weird, it is also very funny. Given the title, of course, we know this a slap at the upper classes, and it is ladled on even further when we find out that the men are involved in cocaine trafficking (yet one of them says, upon seeing a man smoking marijuana) "I hate drug addicts!" Rey's home country is one of brutal oppression, and he is continuously stalked by a would-be assassin, though he always lets her go. He is also sleeping with his friend's wife (Delphine Seyrig).

These pillars of society are presented as buffoons. At another aborted meal, the four guests arrive at Audran (and husband Jean-Pierre Cassel's) house, but the hosts are amorous, and climb down a trellis so they can fuck in the garden (she is very vocal). By  the time they get back, with grass in their hair, the guests are gone, thinking they fled because of an imminent police raid. Thereby a bishop shows up, hoping to be hired as their gardener, but he is thrown out of the house while wearing working togs, but welcomed with open arms in his hassock.

Speaking of the bishop, if The Milky Way was about Bunuel's positive view of the Catholic Church, it seems to have curdled by this time. The bishop here is presented as an ignorant, vain man, and when he is called to give absolution to a dying man he finds out something that makes him ignore his vows.

The film ends with a scene that punctuates the film at various points: the six of them, walking down a country road, without seemingly a clue as to where they are going. This was Bunuel's comment on the upper class of the early '70s. I don't think much has changed.