Critics reviews

The allusions to corrupt Latin American regimes and leftist terrorist cells suggest a certain political anger, but that anger is tempered by Buñuel’s unaccountably genial depiction of the filthy rich characters.

Watching this for the first time took every muscle in my appreciation mechanism. The satire is sharp, the tone startling, the humor cathartic.

There is no tedium in this continual anti-narrative acquiescence, even if we, too, temper our prospects and welcome irrational contradictions, deceptions, and a stream-of-conscious coordination of defeated momentum. Instead, we marvel at the clever capriciousness and the humorous inventiveness.

What makes the movie so strange and transfixing is the characters' dry mannerisms in even the most outré circumstances... For all its intricate symbols and confounding narrative, Discreet Charm is never a "difficult" film. That is in part because it seems so comfortable in its milieu; despite the movie's pointed weirdness, you can lose yourself in it. Buñuel understood this world intimately:

Forever the saboteur of cultural and societal charades, Buñuel shattered the complacency of modern viewers by creating a disquieting work that expressed his resistance to bourgeois values... The grotesquely surreal nature of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie shakes us to the core. But its playful form, exquisite irony and magical ambiguity provoke a sado-chuckle from deep within us.

It's arguably the Spanish surrealist's most accessible late-period masterwork, consistently amusing in its champagne-dry wit, even if it's never quite as trenchant in its autopsy of bourgeois complacency as, for instance, That Obscure Object of Desire. Buñuel and scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière supply the film's stellar cast (a veritable rogues' gallery of French art-house cinema) with an inexhaustible menu of absurd situations to overcome if they ever hope to complete their quixotic quest.

It's all simultaneously scathing and delightful, a potent combination that's very rarely attempted and virtually never as expertly sustained as it is here.

Luis Buñuel's 1972 film boasts one of the best titles in movie history and a cast to match... Buñuel invites us to savor their endless frustration and feast on their irrational impulses. Blithely discontinuous, Discreet Charm has echoes of Buñuel's early surrealist films, although its episodic, interlocking stories suggest the influence of The Saragossa Manuscript and Godard's Weekend.

A vintage as dry as an aged martini, Luis Buñuel's Academy Award-winning The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is not among the director's most lucid critiques of bourgey foolishness, though it remains delectable as a series of wry goosings. Its memorable set pieces, like coal being heaped into the engine of a speeding locomotive, fuel a dream-like narrative that moves forward with a stunning comic fierceness.

If The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie no longer stings as social critique, it still works as a cinematic parlor trick, stacking flashbacks and dream sequences with the giddy surrealism of the endless car pile-up in Godard's Weekend. Moving from vicious satirist to merry prankster, Buñuel lost little vitality in the transition.

Buñuel creates an absurdly comic and wickedly incisive portrait of the meaningless social rituals and polite hypocrisy of the upper middle class in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. By interweaving exaggerated reality with lucid dream sequences, Buñuel blurs the distinction between civilized behavior and social indictment.

Time is banished here, as politics intrude, death knocks, circumstances are misperceived and dreams are tethered to dreams within dreams. There is no through-line to a perceivable start and the Möbius strip of it all happens to be Buñuel at his most blatantly, accessibly fun. "What else is there at my age?" he seemed to ask.