Product Details
- #12344 in VHS
- Released on: 1992-07-24
- Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Number of discs: 1
- Formats: Color, NTSC
- Original language:
French, Spanish
- Running time: 102 minutes
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
What can be more enjoyable then a meal among friends and family? In Luis Buñuel's surrealistic comedy The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie it is this common ritual a sextet of upper-class friends repeatedly attempt, only to be obstructed by one obscure event after another. Masterfully balancing the dichotomy of class vs. debauchery Buñuel delivers a ripping critique of the upper class. It is clear from the beginning that the lives Buñuel’s Bourgeoisie are living are not what they seem. Eventually, their true colors begin to shine; not in actual actions but in haunting dreams. What is real and what lies in the subconscious becoming exceedingly blurry and in order to deliver his message, surrealism must take over. It is hard to pigeonhole Buñuel’s classic that won him the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film 1972: An absurd odyssey? A discreet satire? Not necessarily, but definitely charming. --Rob Bracco
Rating: 
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Amazing Reviews!
I am amazed by all the 5 star reviews, how surreal! No really. I agree with the 1 star posts. The surreal life on MTV is a bit more, ah surreal.
This movie is far from poignant, well...on second thought.
Rating: -
Dopey nonsense
Sorry, I thought this was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen. It went nowhere, said nothing and made me feel like scraping my nails along the wall. No review has made me understand why people think this is a great film. I think people who say they like it just want to appear cool and hip. They would also have said that the emperor was wearing beautiful clothes. Do yourself a favor: Go pick up your dog's poop off the lawn instead of watching this movie.
Rating: 
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Six characters walking together down a road
Different people will get different things from this odd film. I'll share with you what I take from it.
It is a series of events that at first seem real but usually become dreamlike, and sometimes end with one of the characters waking up and revealing the last scene to be a dream of his.
The most memorable scene, for me, is the scene where the major characters are invited to a dinner and, during the dinner, a curtain is raised and the diners are shown to be on a stage, observed by an audience.
This seems to me like a metaphor for our lives. It reminds me of the Shakespeare soliloquy comparing us to actors on a stage. What it says to me is that we are these actors, and there is an unseen audience for us.
To fill out that explanation, we see a bishop who wants to be a gardener. Depending on what he is wearing, he is taken for either a bishop or a gardener. Our identities are not stattic. We are playing parts. We are not what we seem to be. We aren't even what we think we are. We are souls together on a journey, like the six souls walking together along a road, shown to us a number of times throughout the film, and in the final shot.
The separation between life and death is stripped away in this film. Ghosts talk to living characters. Ghosts appear in several scenes, as alive as any of the other characters. Our lives are illusions. Our lives are dreams. Life is a dream. It is not real. Death is not death.
The living are simply the ones invited to dinner, those who are being viewed by an unseen audience. The dead haven't gone away. We are all, alive or dead, souls together on a journey.
Other than that, I can't really make sense of the film, in the sense of putting it all together to form a whole. It is a series of partially related stories. After about an hour of it, I found myself getting a little tired of what was going on. But then it picked up a bit and ended strong enough.
I like the scene of the bishop giving last rites to the man who murdered the bishop's parents, and giving the man forgiveness, and then blowing his head off with a gun.
I also like the scene of the couple having friends over for dinner, and then sneaking out a window to have sex in the garden for 20 minutes before receiving their guests.
Another scene I like is when a man and woman are about to commit adultery, when the woman's husband shows up at the door, the woman herself walks right up to him with a plausible excuse for being there, and the other man asks to have a few minutes alone with the other man's wife while the husband waits for her. Guess why.
These little scenes give you an idea of the flavor of the action of this film, and of its humor.
This film agrees with Shakespeare that we are actors in a play, but doesn't agree with Macbeth's negative judgment that life is a tale told by an idiot. The six characters walking together down that road aren't idiots. They aren't Einstein, but they aren't idiots. They are dreamers, as are we all.
Rating: 
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Like the perfect dry martini...
Film buffs of a certain age will find this two-disc version a real feast: a Bunuel documentary with home movies of the director demonstrating how to make the perfect martini -- which finds an echo in the film itself -- is a wonderful treat, and the original movie is beautifully restored. Of course, then there are the cockroaches scurrying from the piano during the torture scene....and the priest administering the most extreme of last rites. Bunuel's sharp critique of bourgeois morals, religion, and political corruption is at once comic and horrible, the film's characters blissfully unaware (except in their own dreams) of their own desperation. These are old themes, perhaps, but the emptiness of these lives is striking. It will all seem pointless and a bit silly to some who see this movie for the first time, but the endless absurdity of the final image -- you mean that's it? -- makes the director's message clear: for these characters, there just isn't any more.
Rating: -
The endless desire!
The difference between a caprice and a passion which endures the whole life is the caprice endures longer . This statement belongs to Oscar Wilde and it fits for this film as a ring to finger.
Since two couples decide to go dinner , that simple issue will turn in a bitter nightmare with innovative ideas and distorted state of things .. Reality and illusion blended and linked by superb surrealistic situations all along this journey .
Consider as an endless puzzle joke . The conceptual basis of this original film nevertheless you can feel in his previous film The exterminator angel .
Another masterful jewel of this unique director Luis Buñuel.
Rating: -
Excellent surrealism on film
This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, under its original title "Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie" remains one of the most famous surrealist films. Directed by Luis Buñuel, the md credited with creating surrealsim on film does an excellent job in this film.
The story is about six high class people trying to have a meal together, each time they do so, they are interrupted one way or another. Each interruption becomes increasingly more unusual and humorous. The film has excellent acting and humor with great scenery of the French countryside.
This film also won an Academy Award® for best Foreign language film. It is wel deserving of the award though the competition that year was not very difficult. It was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay and lost to "The Candidate"
The Criterion DVD has some great special features also. There is a theatrical trailer and two seperate biographies on Luis Buñuel. Disc 1 contains the film, the theatrical trailer, and a poorly pre-subtitled biography on Buñuel. This documentary is titled, "El náufrago de la calle de Providencia" or "The castaway on Providence Street" which originally aired on television in 1970 in Mexico It is 24 minutes in length.
Disc two contains an all new documentary "A propósito de Buñuel" or "Speaking of Buñuel". This documentary is 98 minutes long and is a retrospective on Buñuel's life intercut with footage of his movies and interviews with family and friends Buñuel. The subtitles on this documentary are a lot better. This documentary contains scenes that may not be suitable for children and young teens.
Rating: -
Masterful tales of charm and horror
Bunuel's handling of narrative is nothing short of masterful in this film. The work's structure is akin to a collection of interconnected short stories - stories that have important ties with Poe's more satirical writings. Each tale offers either a variation on one or more of the film's main characters, or an episode linked in one way or another to the events that surround it. These tales are interesting enough when considered individually, but they gain further levels of meaning if we read them in parallel with the whole work. The film is at once literary and extremely cinematic: the thematic, 'writerly' depth is enhanced by remarkable visual coherence; the cool, precise style hides constant subversion and images range from the brutally shocking to the lyrical. It is customary but somewhat erroneous to say that this work goes back-and-forth between dreams and 'reality' - Bunuel blurs the line between them until differenciation becomes close to impossible. This is a major achievement from one of the supreme masters of the fantastic art.
Rating: -
Yes its a masterpiece, but it didn't do it for me.
I'd like to be able to say that I was blown away by this film. It is after all one of bunel's most famous and most loved. But I wasn't. It was fun. It was quirky. Very odd. Masturfully directed and acted. But in the end the sum total left me feeling strangely unfulfilled. Still highly recommended for cinephiles.
Rating: -
Bunuel at his best
A scathing satire that's funny as well as satirical. Bunuel has a varied career, and it was wonderful to see him have sucess later in life with several of his last films. A great film by truly one of the world's great directors.
Rating: -
Dinner is Served
Director Luis Bunuel is often described as a surrealist, but the word misapplied in reference to his later works; rather than present the viewer with an odd visual display, he prefers to first create a plausible reality and then progressively undercut it with an increasingly implausible series of events. Such is the case with the Academy Award-winning THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, which begins with four friends who arrive at their hosts' home only to discover they have arrived on the wrong night--a plausible situation. But before the film has run its course, Bunuel unravels his tale of a meal that never quite happens in the most unexpected ways imaginable.
The film works on several levels, mocking social conventions, the church, and eventually spilling its action into a series of overlapping nightmares in which various attempts to dine are frustrated by everything from the corpse of a restaurant manager in a nearby room to military manouvers. On one memorable occasion, the friends are invited to dine and are seated around an elegant table--when a curtain suddenly rises behind them and reveals them to be seated on a stage before a hostile audience!
The cast (which features Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier, Stephane Audran and Jean-Pierre Cassel as the constantly frustrated diners) plays with considerable aplomb, performing the most irrational scenes with a magnificent realism. When combined with Bunuel's absurdist story, the result is a disquieting yet often very funny discourse on frustrated appetites both real and imagined, and with many layers of incidental meaning along the way.
The DVD package is very nice, with the film in near-pristine condition and a host of interesting and often amusing extras, and Bunuel fans will consider it more than worth the rather hefty price-tag attached. But a word of caution to the uninitiated: Bunuel is not for those who seek a tidy plot line with clear-cut meanings. If you are not already a fan, you should probably begin with his equally complex but somewhat more accessible and considerably more subtle BELLE DE JOUR before diving off into DISCREET CHARM.
--GFT (Amazon reviewer)--
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