The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Until the last shot of the movie I really was wavering between liking the piece and finding it aimless, boring even.
But then it struck me. The rich, as portrayed in this film, are wandering and aimless, just as they keep walking down that stretch of road which is cut to repeatedly throughout the movie.

The diplomatic immunity, the drug-running without recourse, being let free by the police, none of it has any real meaning. So within these privileged lives they have, still they are plagued by nightmares and troubled thoughts.

Because deep down, even though they are getting away with things that any ruffian pulled in off the street would surely serve hard time for, they know that they don't deserve the comforts and riches they are afforded.

When I first read the description of this movie I expected something more rapidly-paced, light-hearted...madcap, even.

I was pleasantly surprised then, to encounter this surreal, muted, masterpiece. At every point what you expect is not at all what you get with Bunuel. It is this very quality that makes the humor what it is; people don't react to unusual things as one might expect them to. Things that might provoke intense or thunderous reactions often are taken is stride by the characters.

The dream sequences are particularly difficult to discern in this film, as they are filmed in as direct and realistic a manner, just as the waking scenes are. There are no filters used, no tells. Even when a room full of characters are shot by reactionaries while the ambassador to a fictional country, Miranda, cowers under a table and eats lamb, it's a series of events that seems real to the characters presented, so it does not feel false or dream-like.

Bunuel is certainly an acquired taste. As a lover of other films I have seen by him, even I found this movie difficult to engage with. The repetition of each scene, trying to lead up to a dinner party that never fully solidifies, both serves to build tension over the course of the work, but also threatens to lose the audience, who is deprived of release, always teased but never fulfilled by the promise of a dinner scene. To add to this deprivation, the element of dreams is added in the third act, so the audience now does not know what to expect.

The fact that I was unsure of I liked the film until the closing shot speaks to the sure-handed direction of Bunuel. So confident is he inhis mastery of film that he saves his thesis statement until the end. He knows the "rules" of good filmmaking, he just decides not to use them.

I have even seen that Bunuel at first did not intend to space the shots of the three couples walking along the road out as he did. That was an editorial decision made later once he was cutting. And kudos to him for doing so because that's what brought it all together for me.