The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
1972 [FRENCH]
Action / Comedy / Drama / Fantasy

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
Top cast
Movie Reviews
Six Characters In Search of A Dinner
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 ****