The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
★★½ — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
By 1972, Luis Buñuel was in his early seventies and had spent four decades prodding, poking and outright assaulting the sensibilities of polite society on film. From his incendiary early collaborations with Salvador Dalí, through his years working in Mexico, and into a late-career flourish with French co-productions, Buñuel had established himself as cinema's most committed and most mischievous sceptic of religious, political and class institutions. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie arrived as part of that remarkable final stretch, produced by Greenwich Film Production and co-written, as was customary for Buñuel at this stage of his career, with his long-standing screenwriting partner Jean-Claude Carrière. The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a moment of mainstream recognition that sits with a certain irony given how resolutely anti-establishment the whole enterprise is. If you want a sense of where Buñuel had come from by this point, the distance between this film and something like Un Chien Andalou or L'Âge d'or is instructive: the provocations have become more polished, more structurally composed, but the underlying contempt for bourgeois comfort remains entirely intact.
The film centres on a group of six affluent French acquaintances, diplomats, wives and socialites, who keep attempting to sit down together for a meal and keep failing to do so. Interruptions arrive in increasingly strange forms, from the mundane to the macabre to the genuinely dreamlike, and Buñuel offers no reassuring boundary between what is real and what is imagined. The direction is composed and unhurried, which, as many viewers have noted, gives the wilder moments an additional charge. Leading the ensemble is Fernando Rey, a frequent Buñuel collaborator whose ability to project urbane confidence makes him perfectly suited to the kind of character the director most enjoyed dismantling. You may well recognise Rey from The French Connection, released just a year before this, where he occupied a similarly cool, watchful register. Alongside him, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Paul Frankeur fill out a cast that plays the material with the particular skill required: entirely straight-faced, never winking at the audience, behaving as though the escalating absurdity around them is merely a minor inconvenience to the evening's plans.
Buñuel had spent much of his career working at the fringes, from the surrealist shorts of his youth, through documentaries such as Land Without Bread, to the compressed parables of his Mexican period. By the time of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he was working with comfortable resources and considerable artistic freedom, and the result is a film that feels assured in a way his earlier, more deliberately rough-edged work often did not. It is frequently classified as a comedy, and the Academy broadly agreed, but whether it actually functions as one in any conventional sense is, it turns out, a matter of some debate among viewers who approach it in good faith.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), by Luis Buñuel, is a surreal, dreamlike dismantling of middle-class pretensions, political hypocrisy, and the fragile façade of social order. Having seen Buñuel’s earlier work with Salvador Dalí (Un Chien Andalou) I should’ve known to expect something deeply strange, but this film still manages to unsettle and provoke in its own quiet, relentless way. It follows a group of affluent French diplomats and their friends as they attempt, again and again, to sit down for dinner, only to be interrupted by assassinations, unexpected dead bodies, police raids, and increasingly bizarre dream sequences that bleed into reality. On one level, it’s a razor-sharp satire: a commentary on the emptiness of bourgeois rituals, the incompetence of leadership, and the absurdity of aristocratic detachment. These people talk politics while ignoring real suffering, cling to etiquette amid chaos, and remain utterly blind to their own moral vacuume. The film peels back layer after layer of social performance, exposing the rot beneath the fine suits and polite conversation. The cinematography is pristine, elegant framing, smooth tracking shots, and a calm visual rhythm that makes the surreal eruptions feel even more jarring. Ive read multiple reviews thar call it “extraordinarily funny,” but honestly, I didn’t find it funny at all. The humor is so dry, so detached, and so rooted in existential absurdity that it lands more like discomfort than laughter. The lack of logic (characters dying, reappearing, dreaming within dreams) kept me at arm’s length. It’s intellectually fascinating, yes, and clearly a cult classic for good reason, but the very surrealism that defines it is what kept me from fully connecting. Brilliantly crafted, thematically rich, and visually masterful. A damning critique of class and power wrapped in dream logic. Just don’t expect laughs. Expect unease. And maybe a new perspective on your next dinner party.
I keep coming back to that tension between admiration and distance, and I think it's an honest response to a film that seems, on some level, designed to produce exactly that. Buñuel isn't particularly interested in whether you enjoy yourself; he's interested in whether you notice things. And I did notice things, plenty of them, even if the experience was more forensic than pleasurable. It's the kind of film I'm glad exists and glad I've seen, even if I won't be rushing back to it on a quiet Friday night. Sometimes a film earns your respect long before it earns your warmth.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1972 | Watched: 2025-11-04
Trailer
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Luis Buñuel: Land Without Bread (1933) · Simon of the Desert (1965) · L'Âge d'or (1930) · Un Chien Andalou (1929)
More with Fernando Rey: The French Connection (1971)
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1970s: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Here and Elsewhere (1976) · Italianamerican (1974) · Punishment Park (1971)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
