The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

1972 [FRENCH]

Action / Comedy / Drama / Fantasy

24
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 98% · 60 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 88% · 10K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.7/10 10 49349 49.3K

diplomat dream dreams terrorist nightmare upper class

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Plot summary

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

Director

Luis Buñuel Photo
Luis Buñuel

Top cast

Michel Piccoli Photo
Michel Piccoli as Interior Minister
Stéphane Audran Photo
Stéphane Audran as Alice Sénéchal
Jean-Pierre Cassel Photo
Jean-Pierre Cassel as Henri Sénéchal
Delphine Seyrig Photo
Delphine Seyrig as Simone Thévenot
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
933.52 MB
1204*720
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 41 min
Seeds 5
1.69 GB
1792*1072
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 41 min
Seeds 38

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Lejink 8 / 10

Six Characters In Search of A Dinner

I'll be honest, I mostly like my movies to be conventional which simply means to me that they should have a beginning, middle and ending, plus a credible plot and believable characters. I've never cottoned on to the cinema of the surreal or the absurd and have always thought you can keep all that Coen Brothers or Pedro Almodovar stuff away from my door.But, I live in Spain now and I have a learned Spanish neighbour who has encouraged me to watch some Spanish cinema particularly the films of Bunuel and so a few months ago I made a point of watching his earlier work "Viridiana" which I very much enjoyed and deciding to dip into his repertoire again, selected this particular movie, even if it was produced in France, as it seems to be his best known and perhaps most celebrated work. So glad I did.Did I perceive every nuance of the director's intentions? Probably not. Did I understand the bigger arguments he was making, which to be fair is pretty much all there in the title? I think so though I can't be sure. Was I kept watching all the way through down to the delicious combination of intrigue, amusement and curiosity? Absolutely!The narrative is simple. Three male-female couples want to sit down to dinner in modern-day France. The males are all in some way connected to the governance of an imaginary French protectorate in South America called Miranda with the most prominent among them being Fernando Rey as the country's ambassador, but all six are of the distinctly upper class set.But don't be fooled into thinking that these suited and booted individuals are pillars of society. Far from it. As well as apparently having designs on each other's wives we also see that the three men are involved in the illegal trafficking of heroin.It seems that every time they sit down to eat, an ever more bizarre outside intervention takes place before they can put the food to their lips. Much later Bunuel interjects into the narrative the dreams of a young French army officer who just happens along and then the daydreams of the lead characters themselves some of which in fact overlap the dreams of the others. Some of these are eerie, while others are comical.If pushed, yes I can see the film attacking the governing elite, here shown as corrupt and without morals, but it's more the individual scenes that stay in the memory such as the shocking sequence when the local bishop, who joins the group, oddly enough as a gardener, later cold-bloodedly shoots dead an already dying man after he learns that years ago the man was the never-caught killer of his own parents or when the six are slaughtered Romanov-style by presumably Miranda freedom-fighters near the end.But I also love the comic touches like when the group discover themselves playing themselves on stage in front of a baying audience, or when an important telephone conversation is drowned out by the sound of aircraft flying overhead in an almost Woody Allen-type moment. The funniest of many in the film for me was the sight of Ray's character giving himself away to the Miranda assassins by reaching up to the table under which he is concealed for a piece of duck he's waited all movie-long to taste.Listen, don't ask me to write an essay on this film. All I know is that I found it very original, entertaining and funny in equal measure. A moveable feast in fact.
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Reviewed by moonspinner55 6 / 10

Water and soup--and restless dreams--for the cultivated classes...

French-Italian-Spanish co-production under the helm of director Luis Buñuel concerning an odd-duck group of upper-class friends and acquaintances in Paris who meet often for meals and conversation, only to rarely savor their cuisine due to a peculiar series of interruptions. Buñuel, who also co-authored the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, at times gently skewers the hungry wealthy; his characters are not decadent nor lazy, perhaps just comically fettered; the filmmaker doesn't score points against their lives as much as he prods the folly of their ways. The lapses of reality into a satirical daisy-chain of dreams is surprising at first but finally monotonous, especially as Buñuel becomes less sly here and more mean-spirited (I could have done without the police interrogation and the piano torture). Still, there are some marvelous visual touches (such as the dinner table on-stage) accompanied by a subtle yet vivid use of color, and the cast is uniformly excellent. Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film. **1/2 from ****

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