THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
released in France September 15, 1972
France, Italy, & Spain / Color / French and Spanish with English Subtitles

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric, Oscar-winning masterpiece, an upper-class sextet (Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Cassel) sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts repeatedly thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined. Perhaps his greatest film, Buñuel’s absurdist view of the upper class is a timeless satire about consumerism and class privilege.

Rated PG; 102 min

Most of the films of Luis Bunuel are comedies in one way or another, but he doesn’t go for gags and punch lines; his comedy is more like a dig in the ribs, sly and painful.- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

There are masterpieces scattered among Buñuel’s French films like confetti, but here one of cinema’s most brilliant directors made the most brilliant film of his career. – Jake Euker, Filmcritic.com

An exotic and brilliant hothouse flower of a film. – Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

Take a look again at its dream sequences, especially the nocturnal one involving the young man in the side street, and you will see a master disturber still at work. – Peter Rainer, New York Magazine

Luis Buñuel’s 1972 comic masterpiece, about three well-to-do couples who try and fail to have a meal together, is perhaps the most perfectly achieved and executed of all his late French films. – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Luis Buñuel

Often referred to as the father of cinematic surrealism, director Luis Bunuel was born February 22, 1900, in the Aragon region of Spain. While studying at the University of Madrid, he became friends with painter Salvador Dali, poet Federico Garcia Lorca and other Spanish artists.

Bunuel entered the film world with a bang in 1929 with the 17-minute Un Chien Andalou, a collaboration with Dali that shocked audiences with its image of a woman’s sliced eyeball. Bunuel, a Jesuit-educated atheist, followed this with his first feature, L’Age D’Or, which many saw as a scathing attack on the Catholic Church.

In 1967, Bunuel began a partnership with producer Serge Silbermand and writer Jean-Claude Carrie that would result in his greatest films, including Belle de Jour (starring Catherine Deneuve), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire. Bunuel died July 29, 1983