- Very few films make me want to stand up and shout "The Emperor is Wearing No Clothes!" but Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is one of them. I am completely baffled that a film every bit as vacuous as the upper-middle-class citizens it attempts to satirize has any critical reputation at all, let alone an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. That it came out in the same year as the infinitely superior Aguirre, The Wrath of God is practically nauseating. Incidentally, both films deal with the foibles of aristocracy, but only one of them uses gorgeous location scenery and mesmerizing characters to create an indelible image on the mind. The other one stretches out a single joke for 102 minutes and never really tells it well.
- The depressing thing is, I really wanted to like this film. I personally find "foodie" culture, wine snobs, and other modern bourgeois affectations to be incredibly obnoxious, so I should have been predisposed in favor of Buñuel. But no, having various dinners constantly interrupted by increasingly absurd circumstances just didn't do it for me. I don't hold the cast responsible. Fernando Rey was terrific in The French Connection (a great film), and Jean-Pierre Cassel was fine in Army of Shadows (a really great film). Tellingly, the best part of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie occurs when its tiresome characters get machine-gunned at the end, but this is disappointingly revealed to be a dream. Everything else is surrealist garbage suggesting that the few interesting scenes in Un Chien Andalou should be attributed solely to Salvador Dalí.
