Luis Bunuel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie” (1972)
φιλμοκριτική Larry Peitzman
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
December 1972
Κινηματογραφικά
( φωτο από το IMDb )
( φωτο από το IMDb )
( φωτο από το IMDb )
Luis
Bunuel
By
Larry Peitzman
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Director:
Luis Bunuel.
Luis Bunuel's
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” is a master’s piece. It is the kind of
movie that could only have been made by a director as famous and secure in his
craft as Bunuel, because half the fun of the film comes from what we know about
Bunuel and how he teases us with what we have come to expect from him.
Bunuel began
his career in 1928, slashing eyeballs in “Un Chien Andalou” (made in
collaboration with Salvador Dali), and since then we have become all too familiar
with the Bunuel landscape. We have come to expect the dream sequences, the
nightmare imagery; we have come to know that piety in Bunuel films is just a
mask for venal souls and corruption always lurks behind the veneer of polite
manners.
He turns this
knowingness on us in his new film, Bunuel, at 72, has lost none of his disgust
and anger, none of his bile, but in “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” he
has reversed his strategy and adopted a new plan of attack. It is almost as if
Bunuel wanted to prove that he could beat the bourgeoisie at its own sly game.
“The Discreet
Charm” is a surrealists comedy of manners. Part of the joke is that Bunuel has
reversed the situation of his own “Exterminating Angel,” in which the guests at
a dinner party find they cannot leave and gradually descend into savagery.
“The Discreet
Charm” is composed of a series of elegant dinner parties that are interrupted
before they can begin.
Bunuel’s
three central bourgeois couples are discreet and charming, indeed. The cast is
a veritable aristocracy of European cinema: Stephane Audran (“Le Boucher”),
Bulle Ogier (“La Salamandre”), Jean-Pierre Cassel (“The Five Day Lover”),
Delphine Seyrig (“Last Year at Marienbad”) and Fernando Rey (the big heroin
dealer who walked away from the carnage at the end of “The French Connection”),
Audran is the
standout of this distinguished cast; to watch her order her servants in the
kitchen, then emerge, all smiles for her guests is to see the bourgeois charm
in operation.
Bunuel’s
three couples may never get down to a meal, but no matter; they dress
exquisitely and know how to mix martinis. The gentlemen, of course, are
involved in heroin traffic and are paranoid about being caught. In the last of
the film's sequences, each of the three men dreams that a dinner party is
disrupted in some curiously fearful way; one dreams that all three couples are
shot by gangsters. One that he has assasinated his dinner companion. The third
dreams that the dinner party turns out to be part of a play, with a live
audience: “But I don't know the lines,” he says, embarrassed.
Bunuel has
traversed this terrain before; of course, one feels obliged to say of the film,
as one says of Fellini's films, that no one but the master could have made it.
In the case of Fellini’s latest films, however, the obligation to acknowledge
the master’s hand weighs heavy: who else would want to make “The Clowns” or
“Roma”? They have no point; it’s just Federico telling us again what he has
told us before, repeating his old tricks on a grander, less human scale. Ah,
we're meant to say, a Fellini street scene, Fellini freaks! But it is another
Fellini street scene, and the grotesques have become such a staple of Fellini
movies that to see an ordinary human being in them seems truly freaky.
Bunuel is up
to his old tricks in “The Discreet Charm,” but this time he's playing the
familiar surrealist game for fun, and this gives the old tricks new life, Bun¬
uel offers here a kind of Pop surrealism, similar to what Roy Lichtenstein
accomplished in his pop art adaptations of Monet’s “Cathedral at Rouen,”
blowing “serious” art up to comic proportions and formalizing it so that it
becomes a caricature of itself.
Bunuel toys
with, the old techniques here. A young soldier will enter the picture out of
nowhere to ask “May I tell you the story of my childhood?” and the film will be
diverted into a grisly sequence about how the ghost of the soldier's mother had
come to him when he was very young and asked him to poison his father.
As soon as
Bunuel involves us in this sequence, he throws us out again. The soldier's
question — “May I tell you the story of my childhood?” — is just a tease, a
cue, like Fred Astaire asking Ginger Rogers “Do I hear music playing?”
Bunuel's
nightmare sequences have become surrealist production numbers, created for the
sheer pleasure and amusement of the director. Bunuel slips in and out of his
dream sequences at will, just to show that he can do it. And it’s fun to watch,
because we are constantly being caught by surprise, but after a while, one gets
the uneasy feeling that while we are laughing at the director's jokes so
knowingly, the joke is, finally, on us.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian,
vol. 7, No. 5, December 13, 1972, [column: Film], p. 28.
( φωτο από το IMDb )
“Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie” (1972)
Σκηνοθεσία:
Luis Bunuel
Σενάριο:
Luis Bunuel / Jean-Claude Carriere
Φωτογραφία:
Edmond
Richard
έγχρωμον
διάρκεια: 102 λεπτά
Οι ηθοποιοί:
/ - Fernando Rey
/ - Paul Frankeur
/ - Delphine Seyrig
/ - Jean-Pierre Cassel
/ - Stephane Audran
/ - Bulle Ogier
/ - Julien Bertheau
/ - Milena Vukotic
/ - Maria Gabriella Maione
/ - Claude Pieplu
/ - Pierre Maguelon
/ - Francois Maistre
/ - Michel Piccoli
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 2 Ιανουαρίου 2025 :
Luis Bunuel
“The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeosie” (1972)
φιλμοκριτική Larry Peitzman
The San Francisco Bay Guardian
December 1972
Κινηματογραφικά ]
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