Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972)

Sociology is a subject that has always fascinated me, and, had I not been bitten by the Legend of Zelda bug as a child, I would certainly be in that line of work today. I often read about the topic, however, which, other than leading to bizarre conversations with friends deep into the night over a bottle of wine, has the side effect of triggering epiphanies for me in the most unexpected of places. For instance, a couple of months ago, my wife and I went for lunch to a small ramen shop near where we live, being sat next to a young married couple and their 5- or 6-years-old son, whom, we'd overheard, they had brought along for his first "official" taste of the dish. As we ate, we couldn't help paying attention to a particular advice they gave him about how to properly enjoy his food: "You must always make noise while slurping ramen," they said, "because the louder you are, the tastier it will be, and the happier the cook will become". My wife, being Japanese herself, promptly consented with a nod, which, in turn, reminded me of a delightful scene in Jūzō Itami's Tampopo (1985), on how civilized people should eat ("civilized" being, of course, a relative term). That whole situation made me sneer at her at first... until I realized that I, too, had been doing the same all along! Certainly, by having lived in Japan for the past few years, loudly slurping ramen was one of the habits I picked along the way, even though I was raised being told making noise while eating was an awful thing to do -- probably the reason why I (maybe instinctively) still eat silently when abroad. Likewise, even though my wife was brought up being told the exact opposite, that you do need to make noise in order to fully enjoy your meal, she too refrains from doing so when overseas -- except when we're alone! And then it hit me: on being social animals, we are unconsciously compelled to adapt to the rules governing the community in which we belong, even if deep inside we disagree with those rules -- showing our true selves only when alone or in close company! That was no breakthrough in the field of Sociology, naturally, as such idea had already been proposed by the likes of Talcott Parsons and (the unfortunately named) Dennis Wrong a few decades ago, but it was somewhat amusing to realize that I, my wife and the people around us were all living examples of those theories. According to Parsons and Wrong, because our motivational drives, guided by our animal instincts, do not always conform with the social discipline we have internalized, we are bound to seek self-gratification in secret -- which, in turn, makes us hypocrites by default. It so happens that a Surrealist director called Luis Buñuel thought this behavior to be particularly funny, mocking it in a great deal of his movies. Case in point: Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, his light-hearted tribute to the fundamental sanctimoniousness in us all, and, after that lunch, the movie I couldn't wait to rewatch.

The main characters in the movie, in one of the many
shots in which they follow a road seemingly to nowhere

Not much can be said about the story in Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, for the simple fact that there is none. The movie is composed of a series of anecdotes centered around the Sénéchals, Alice (Stéphane Audran) and Henri (Jean-Claude Carrière), and their failed attempts at hosting a dinner party for their close friends the Thévenots, François (Paul Frankeur) and Simone (Delphine Seyrig), Florence (Bulle Ogier), Simone's younger sister, and Don Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey), the ambassador of the fictitious Latin American country of Miranda. On their first attempt, an innocent misunderstanding makes their guests arrive on a different day than expected. With no preparations made, their host, Alice, at first proposes that they share her dinner, but promptly acquiesces to Mr. Thévenot's idea of going to a nearby restaurant instead. Upon arriving (and being strangely made wait by the door), they proceed to chose their food, but are taken aback by the muffled sound of someone crying. The ladies in the group, puzzled, proceed to look for the source of that sound, discovering, to their dismay, that a funeral for the owner of that establishment was being held in that very room! The dinner party for that night is then, naturally, cancelled. And so would be their next attempt, and the following one, and the one after that... with the film closing with all its main characters following an empty road to no place in particular, the same road we are shown them walking several times.

The Colonel's reaction to the Sergeant saying
he had a very nice dream to relate to them all

Surrealism, spearheaded in France by André Breton after World War I, was an artistic and literary movement which aimed at overthrowing the oppressive rules of modern society by demolishing its backbone of rational thought, believed to repress the power of imagination. Surrealist artists hence rejected waking logic in favor of echoing the irrational flow of dreams, following closely in the footsteps of their Dada counterparts in creating art whose objective was both to shock their audience out of their bourgeois complacency, and to play with their expectations through the juxtaposition of non-related ideas. Fascinated by Sigmund Freud's theories on the inner workings of the unconscious mind, which, they believed, legitimized the ideals of their movement, it was common for Surrealist artists to make use of Freudian symbolism in their creations (reason why sexual imagery usually permeated their work). It found its solace in cinema through the geniuses of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, with their Un Chien Andalou (1929) and, soon after, L'Age d'Or (1930), which, despite not being the first Surrealist movies ever made (see, for example, Germaine Dulac's mystifying La Coquille et le Clergyman - 1928), were pioneers in their bending of film grammar to, in effect expand it, much like D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein had done some years before.

Surrealist movies, by being inherently void of structure, invite their audience to extrapolate meaning from what they are shown, a fact that was greatly exploited by their playful directors. Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, thus, written by Luis Buñuel himself and long collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, adheres strictly to that principle: one hundred people may watch a Buñuel movie and all have distinct (yet valid) interpretations for the same scenes, even though none might have been explicitly intended. As an illustration, consider the enigmatic depictions of the main characters walking down an empty road to seemingly no place in particular. Are they a recurring dream those characters are having? Are they a metaphor for their lack of point in life? Are they "a symbol of the awakening of the society around them"? Or are they "a symbolic image suggesting the continuation [of] both of their class and of the picaresque narrative tradition that propels them forward"? Alas, in the words of director/screenwriter Luis Buñuel, "I regret to say there is no message there".

We do know for certain, however, that, as revealed by Buñuel in his memoir, Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie forms a "trilogy of sorts" with his La Voie Lactée (1969) and Le Fantôme de la Liberté (1974):

One of the several "nuisances" preventing the six friends
from enjoying their dinner together

"All three have the same themes, the same grammar; and all evoke the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you've found it. All show the implacable nature of social rituals; and all argue for the importance of coincidence, of a personal morality, and of the essential mystery in all things, which must be maintained and respected."

With all three movies singling out the French upper middle class as one of their main targets for mockery, one might be inclined to think that their scripts would have been written with that social stratum in mind. Carrière, nevertheless, affirms that, at least for Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, that was not the case:

"We never thought about bourgeoisie. The title came at the very end when we had finished the script. The title gives a certain angle to watch the film. Like in the surrealist paintings – apparently paintings with no meaning no sense, no direction; but the title gives you a way to look at the painting. And I think it’s the same for the title of this film."

The Sénéchals, Henri (Jean-Claude Carrière) and Alice
(Stéphane Audran), escaping through the window to
have sex in the garden, while their guests socialize
in their  living room 

Nonetheless, take, for instance, the scene in which a poor lady goes to the Sénéchals looking for a priest to give the last rites to an even poorer gardener: Mme. Sénéchal talks to her with such lack of empathy that it seems as if the destitute lady had come to simply borrow a cup of sugar! The way I see it, it is difficult not to interpret this scene as a deliberate jab at the middle class, because, were Alice Sénéchal rich, she would delegate her orders though a governess of sorts, thus not having any contact whatsoever with the unexpected visitor at her front gate; were she poor, she would certainly have shared the grief of her unfortunate guest, whom she would see as her equal. As it stands, this is Buñuel saying Mme. Sénéchal is just wealthy enough not to care. In other words, a bourgeoise who feels as detached from that old lady's problems as the victims of the Nigerian Civil War she probably saw on TV a couple of years earlier, both related to a France she does not identify as the one in which she lives. Furthermore, in a later scene in which all friends are chatting at the dinner table, their host, Mr. Sénéchal, introduces the topic of a former Nazi who had recently been arrested, and his guest Florence's main concern was, of all things, whether or not that war criminal was kind to animals! Again, it is highly suspicious that interest in animal protection was quite in vogue at the time among many in her social status in France... but on the other hand, being this a Buñuel movie, there is a good chance that I, as stated by Carrière, am just seeing the movie though the prism that is its title.

Don Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey) and Francois Thévenot
(Paul Frankeur) disdaining the Colonel for openly smoking
marijuana, despite being themselves cocaine dealers
when out of public view

The fact that all episodes described above allude to death is no coincidence: every time the six friends are about to enjoy their meal together, their celebration is interrupted by some ludicrous event dealing with that very subject; nevertheless, no matter how odd, gruesome or unusual the situations they go through, all seems to have been forgotten by their next scene! A man confesses to have killed his step-father as a child, and the lady friends are annoyed because there is no more coffee at the bistro they are at; a woman tries to assassinate Don Rafael, and is hurriedly disposed of by him because he has to get ready for a dinner party later that day. These are Buñuel and Carrière cunningly exploiting the lack of narrative flow of Surrealist films, juxtaposed to the particularly extreme topic of the mortality of man, to stress even further the self-centered nature of their characters. Yet, more than mocking the bourgeoisie (the Church and the Army included, of course) for being egotistical and self-indulgent, Buñuel's central subject is its hypocrisy -- its discrete charm, so to speak. Take the scene in which François Thévenot is making fun of Don Rafael's chauffeur for not knowing the civilized way of drinking a martini. Little does he know, but, while they gloat about their sophistication, their hosts, the  Sénéchals, have just jumped out of the window to have sex in the garden. These are the same Rafael and François that, albeit exploiting the former's diplomatic immunity to traffic cocaine internationally, strongly reproach a Colonel, friend of the Sénéchals, for openly smoking marijuana at a party. Yet, in spite of such a deep, trusting friendship, Don Rafael has no reservations about having an affair with his associate's wife, Simone, not even flinching when Mr. Thévenot comes unexpectedly to his apartment and comes across her -- Rafael knows his friend is too courteous to object. Instead, Rafael chooses to exploit his friend's fake intellectualism, by telling him to go on ahead, while Simone stays a little while longer to see his "sursiks". François, as expected, pretends to know what "sursiks" are, chooses to inquire no further, and promptly leaves the room -- a befitting allegory for the bourgeoisie falling victim of its own pretense... but then again, since this is a movie by Buñuel, maybe not.

My wife hated the movie, by the way. Comedy is indeed the genre that loses the most in translation... but this is a topic for a future post.

Summarizing it:

Liked	Didn't like
A unique movie that only improves with multiple viewings	Makes you wish for the Buñuel / Monty Python collaboration that never was
Bulle Ogier's Florence made me laugh out loud several times

The definitive explanation as to why the Sénéchals and their friends are untouchable in the eyes of the law:

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Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.

If you liked this movie, then maybe try watching pretty much anything by Buñuel, starting by The Exterminating Angel (1962).

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