The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. 1972. France/Italy/Spain. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Screenplay by Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. With Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier. The 4K restoration was produced by Studiocanal in 2022 with the support of the CNC. Restoration work was carried out by L’Image Retrouvée laboratory from the original 35mm negative. In French; English subtitles. 101 min.
The Discreet Charm is one of Buñuel’s greatest and most perversely mischievous films, and although he claimed his favorite characters were the cockroaches, Bulle Ogier still gets some of the funniest lines. “Luis Buñuel’s 1972 comic masterpiece, about three well-to-do couples who try and fail to have a meal together,” Jonathan Rosenbaum observes, “is perhaps the most perfectly achieved and executed of all his late French films. The film proceeds by diverse interruptions, digressions, and interpolations (including dreams and tales within tales) that, interestingly enough, identify the characters, their class, and their seeming indestructibility with narrative itself. One of the things that makes this film as charming as it is, despite its radicalism, and helped Buñuel win his only Oscar is the perfect cast, many of whom bring along nearly mythic associations acquired in previous French films. Frightening, funny, profound, and mysterious.”