The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

****
Country: France-Italy-Spain
Director: Luis Buñuel

What the hell do you write about a movie directed by Luis Buñuel? His films don't deal in a direct way with social, political, or ethical issues, so a discussion of theme isn't really relevant. Even on the rare occasions he worked with major stars like Simone Signoret or Catherine Deneuve, he used actors essentially as extensions of his imagination, so a discussion of personalities and performances doesn't hold much promise either. Also out is the topic of style. Though admired by bold film stylists like Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Buñuel was himself one of the most straightforward of directors, his style virtually a definition of the expression "invisible technique." Yet he was in a way the ultimate auteur director, forging a creative identity not through subject or style, but by vividly showing us his own wholly idiosyncratic view of the world, his personal alternate reality, in one film after another. While other directors have also attempted this, I can't think of one who has used this approach so prolifically, so adroitly, or so intelligibly as Buñuel.

Like a number of Buñuel's later films, his 1972 comic masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is organized not around a traditional rising and falling arc of action but, like a piece of music, around a theme and a set of variations. Here the theme is six people—three men and three women—trying to sit down for a meal and repeatedly getting interrupted before they can get started. The variations consist of their trying time after time to dine, only to be thwarted again. No matter what the circumstances, they just can't seem to finish a meal. It's perpetually delayed gratification, the gastronomic equivalent of involuntary coitus interruptus.

Buñuel returned time and again in his films to certain subjects, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie touches on just about all of them—sex, death, Catholicism, fetishes and phobias, the convergence of dream and reality. What sets this film apart is that here Buñuel's preoccupations are wrapped around his trenchant view of the mores and behavior of the bourgeoisie. His six main characters are exemplars of their class, people for whom surfaces and appearances are everything, not just in their homes, grooming and dress, and genteel pastimes, but above all in their deportment. They are unfailingly observant of the social niceties. Even when disagreeing they are decorous and restrained. Their guiding principle seems to be that one must respond to every situation with perfect manners.

It's an ethos that in this film Buñuel thoroughly trashes. As we know, appearances can be deceiving, and that's certainly the case with this group of people. In their public lives they might appear flawlessly urbane and mannerly, but their private lives leave a far different impression. Led by Rafael (Buñuel favorite Fernando Rey), the ambassador from a small Latin American country, the men are all involved in a cocaine-smuggling ring. Simone (Delphine Seyrig), the wife of another of the men, is having an affair with Rafael. Simone's sister (Bulle Ogier) is a bored young woman who's permanently half sloshed. The cultured Rafael has no qualms about having his country's secret police kidnap a young female revolutionary, presumably to be interrogated and tortured or even assassinated.  Overcome with lust, Alice (Stéphane Audran) and Henri Sénéchal (Jean-Pierre Cassel) keep their dinner guests waiting while they sneak into the shrubbery for a quick one.  All those vulgar human urges these paragons of bourgeois refinement so thoroughly repress have to find an outlet somewhere, and beneath the surface their outwardly respectable lives are riddled with hypocrisy and vice.

Lest you get the impression that this film is a somber affair, let me assure you that it most certainly is not. Buñuel treats all these things with the lightest and wittiest touch imaginable. This is one very entertaining film, and a very funny one. The humor is derived not from pratfalls or any of the other traditional comedic devices, but instead from the contrast between the social ideal these people have set for themselves and the sudden irruption of the unpredictable into their lives. Their world is all about control, both of themselves and of their environment, so any intrusion of chaos is bound to have an exaggerated effect. This works on us as well. The first part of the film lulls us into an expectation of normalcy in the lives and behavior of these people, and when that normalcy becomes disrupted with increasing frequency and in increasingly outlandish ways, we're caught off guard. The effect on us, as on the characters, is not just startling, but through its sheer anomaly very, very funny.

No film director has ever been able to integrate dreams and narrative as seamlessly as Buñuel. Around half-way through the film, he introduces the subject of dreams when a young soldier interrupts the would-be diners to describe the dream he had the night before. From this point on, without ever losing its narrative thread, the film becomes a series of episodes which each culminate in a dream of some act that is shocking to the bourgeois sensibility—an act of extreme public embarrassment, of violence, of the supernatural, of death. The more of these episodes we see, the more the film itself takes on a dreamlike atmosphere and the more we begin to wonder if the entire movie might be a Chinese puzzle of dreams within dreams, all prompted by Rafael's attack of the nocturnal munchies.

As each dream tops the previous one, Buñuel seems to be pushing the boundaries of conventional narrative logic in the direction of dream logic, in which things don't always make sense on the rational level yet somehow resonate on an unconscious level. It's a surrealist vision of art in which images and incidents seem to spring directly from Buñuel's unconscious and connect unmediated with the unconscious of the viewer, a way of artistic communication so inherently nonverbal that it is nearly impossible to describe concretely. This might all sound frightfully intellectual and rarefied, but Buñuel's sense of detached amusement keeps the film from developing even the merest whiff of pretension. He's basically just having fun with the notion that any sense can be made of a universe that is fundamentally absurd.

Of all the images in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, there is one above all others that I have carried with me ever since first seeing the film. At three points—not long after the beginning of the film, again near the middle, and finally right before the end—Buñuel digresses for a short montage of the six main characters strolling down a country road in the sunshine on a summer day. I wouldn't venture to speculate what Buñuel intends by these images, if such a thing is even possible. But I do know that when I think of this film, it's the first thing I picture in my mind, those six wandering characters in search of a movie.

This post was written as part of the ongoing Comedy Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie came in at #39. Be sure to check out all the great films being covered in the countdown, which runs through late December.

237. Tristana

237. (06 Oct) Tristana (1970, Luis Buñuel) 54



Tristana tackles immense themes, as a young woman is taken advantage of by her older male guardian, a man obsessed with the notion of personal freedom only when it's convenient. Less visual and more talky than most Buñuel, it's nevertheless fascinating seeing the twisted, abusive dynamic between these two characters. They're expertly played by Fernardo Rey and Catherine Deneuve. Rey is the standout here, at his best when brooding and declaring he acts as both husband and father to Deneuve as it suits him. Franco Nero is the dashing third point of their love triangle.

The scripting is a little obvious in that anyone's innocence can be easily lost, as everyone's choices are half-chance. Notions regarding love and maturity are simplified in Tristana; with youth comes naivety, middle age brings bitterness, and seniority makes one soft and sentimental. That arc isn't unbelievable, but it plays out jarringly in the film's second half. Buñuel offers some abstractions, particularly in a subplot about a deaf boy, to make his story seem more profound. While there's intrigue throughout, this is mostly an odd misstep for the auteur.

The Milky Way (1969)

***^½
Country: France-West Germany-Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel

The General, It Happened One Night, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Sullivan's Travels, Detour, Easy Rider, Into the Wild—the road movie is one of the most enduring and versatile of film genres. Its literary roots stretch as far back as Homer's Odyssey and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But surely one of the oddest, most unique, and most startling of all road movies is the great Luis Buñuel's surrealistic-religious version of that venerable genre, The Milky Way, from 1969.

In the film two hitchhiking tramps, Pierre and Jean (Peter and John, names clearly chosen for their Christian connotations), undertake one of the medieval pilgrimage routes from France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where the cathedral is said to contain the remains of St. James. As in most road movies, along the way they have colorful experiences and encounters with various people—but with some important differences that distinguish this from the typical road movie. For one thing, this is a Buñuel movie, so unpredictability and departure from strictly literal storytelling are to be expected. For another, because the individual episodes always involve religion in some way, they are linked thematically. And most curious of all, Pierre and Jean act sometimes as participants in the events of the film, sometimes more as observers who wander in and out of the episodes enacted around them, exactly the same as in dreams, where the dreamer's point of view can suddenly shift in just this way.

Each vignette in the movie serves as an anecdote of some kind about the Roman Catholic religion. Except for Pierre and Jean, everyone in the movie seems to be preoccupied with religion, endlessly pondering the polemics of Catholic dogma. But Pierre and Jean, who don't seem to be devout or even practicing Catholics, never discuss religion even though miracles constantly happen around them. Almost as soon as they set out they have an encounter with what appears to be Buñuel's bizarre personification of the trinity—an oracular man in a black cape accompanied by a dwarf and a white dove. Right after they comfort a child who bears the stigmata of Christ sitting alone by the side of the road, a chauffeured limousine pulls up and gives them a ride, almost, it seems, as a reward for their compassion. Later, when a passing Citroën speeds past them without stopping, Pierre mutters, "I hope he breaks his neck," and a moment later we hear screeching brakes and a crash. When they rush to the wrecked car, they find the angel of death sitting in the car waiting to show them that their prayer has been answered. Yet aside from causing understandable amazement, these miraculous incidents have little effect on them and never direct their thoughts or conversation towards any religious or spiritual topic.

As Pierre and Jean make their way to Santiago, scenes from their journey alternate with scenes from the past (including scenes of the Marquis de Sade and the Inquisition), their reveries about what they are experiencing, tangential scenes of the religious experiences of the people they encounter in which they play little or no part, and scenes from the life of Christ that offer some parallel to what is happening to them at the moment. Early in the film, for example, Pierre tells Jean that he wears a beard because his mother told him he looks better with it. This is immediately followed by a scene in which Christ prepares to shave his beard and the Virgin Mary tells him not to shave because he looks better with a beard. At the end of the film, just as the two vagabonds reach the outskirts of Santiago, they encounter a prostitute (Delphine Seyrig) who invites them into the woods for sex. The camera then pans away from the three, and we see Christ and his disciples walking through these same woods, where they encounter two blind men, whose sight Christ proceeds to restore in a weird parallel to the sexual encounter of our pilgrims.

Much of the film consists of people debating the theological enigmas of the Catholic church as though these were the most pressing of issues. Many of the most divisive historical controversies of Catholicism are included—free will versus predestination, the nature of the trinity, the nature of the Virgin Mary—quarrels which have spawned heresies, caused schisms, and resulted in excommunication, torture, and even death for those on the wrong side. Although the debates in the film generally end inconclusively, one—on the question of transubstantiation in the Eucharist, that is, how the body of Christ can be contained in the bread used in the communion service—is ingeniously resolved by an uneducated innkeeper. It's like this rabbit pâté I'm serving you, he tells his argumentative guests as Pierre and Jean observe from another table: the rabbit is in the pâté, yet it's still pâté. As in the other debates of this nature, the famously anticlerical Buñuel makes one of the most sacred doctrinal disputes of the Church seem utterly inane.

What I have described might sound rather like a narrative hodgepodge, with one episode following another haphazardly as the pilgrims proceed along their route, the progress of that journey about the only thing in the movie that could be called linear. But somehow it all manages to hold together, the film's coherence the result of its own crazy internal logic that fuses realism with mysticism, cogency with randomness. The images and the ideas don't fit together in any sort of conventionally logical way, but in the analogical way that dream images and events do. The film clearly shows Buñuel's thorough understanding of the psychological underpinnings of surrealism and absurdism and the exceptional skill with which he was able to translate those concepts into cinematic terms. I can't think any other filmmaker who would have been able to take such an unlikely mélange and make it work so well—poking fun at what is basically a serious subject in such a bracingly comical way and with such bemused detachment—as Buñuel does in The Milky Way.

Director Point Totals in Critics Top 1000

I totalled up all the films for each listing in the critics top 1000, and these are the resulting point totals, not that I agree with the results. I decided to go to 120 rather than 100 because of some of those just out of the 100, like Yimou, Cimino, Campion, Reifenstahl, Eastwood.
Photo courtesy of FanPix.com





Director Points
1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US

Director Film Counts in the Critics 1000

Directors with the most films in the critics top 1000.

Top Ten:
1. John Ford (18)
2. Fritz Lang (16)
3. Luis Bunuel (15)
4. Alfred Hitchcock (14)
5-6. Ingmar Bergman (13), Jean-Luc Godard (13)
7. Federico Fellini (12)
8-10. Howard Hawks (11), Stanley Kubrick (11), Akira Kurosawa (11)

10 each: Chaplin, Mizoguchi, J.Renoir
9 each: Scorsese, Visconti, Powell (9 total, 7 w Pressburger)
8

A Cinematic Feast: Great Movie Dining Scenes, Part 1

Doesn't everyone love lists, especially cinephiles? The Internet Movie Database lists their top 250 films. The American Film Institute has numerous lists—the top 100 movies, stars, laughs, thrills, and songs are only a few—and regularly comes up with new ones, the latest the top 10 movies in 10 genres. Critics publish their top-10 lists at the end of every calendar year. Even the British indulge in cinematic listmania. A few months ago the Times published its list of the top 20 movie endings of all time (which, curiously, didn't include Citizen Kane). And just recently the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma published its own list of the 100 greatest films of all time. I love lists too, and today I want to list my favorite eating scenes in classic movies.

When I read a novel or short story and the characters are having a meal, for me it's not enough to be told simply that they ate. I want to know exactly what they ate. The more complete the description of the fare, then the more vivid the scene is for me. Taste is, after all, one of the five senses, but because it's so difficult to describe in words, it's the one most often missing in works of written fiction. Even the senses of smell and touch tend to get more attention in literature.

Movies have even more difficulty with physical sensations than books do. Movies can't even describe physical sensations; they can only suggest them visually. And movies can't directly engage any of the senses except sight and sound. John Waters did experiment with a gimmick called Odorama, a version of the scratch-and-sniff card, which he used in Polyester to get the sense of smell into the movie experience. In his movie The Tingler ("Ghastly Beyond Belief!") horror schlockmeister William Castle used a vibrating device called Percepto that was attached to seats in the theater and vibrated whenever a character in the movie screamed. And in the novel Brave New World Aldous Huxley described the "feelies," movies that allow the viewer to experience the physical sensation of touch associated with events in the film, although that was strictly imaginary.

Even though they can't make us taste what the characters are eating, movies can show us the act of eating in vivid ways, whether that vividness comes from the visual strength of a scene or from its narrative impact. What follows is Part 1 of a strictly personal list, in a deliberately chosen but otherwise not significant order, of the fifteen eating scenes in classic movies that I find the most memorable.


•Viridiana, Luis Buñuel (1961). This movie is the first one on my list simply because it's the first one I think of when I think of eating scenes in movies. It was one of the first foreign-language films I ever saw, at the very impressionable age of eighteen. The first movie that Buñuel had made in Spain in decades, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. But it was banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican, and when you see the sequence that culminates in the freeze-frame pictured above, you can understand why. This is the ragtag bunch of misfits and pariahs that the naive title character, recently departed from the convent, has assembled to form a Utopian community at her uncle's farm. But when the masters of the house are absent on business, these pathetic outcasts break into the main house, set the table with the best china, break into the pantry and wine cellar, and stage an unforgettable beggars' banquet.

As the drunken meal reaches its peak, one of the women says she wants to take a photo of the occasion. "What will you use for a camera?" asks one of the men. "I'll use the camera my father gave me," she replies, then lifts her skirts, bends over backwards, and aims her crotch at the revelers. The photo she "takes" is the one above. Having grown accustomed to these characters throughout the movie and having come to regard them merely as a colorful ensemble, the viewer is completely unprepared to see them arrayed thus. Once seen, who could forget the image? Certainly not Robert Altman, who copied it in MASH, or the makers of the TV series Battelstar Galactica, who also copied it in their publicity for a recent season of the show. The sequence ends in a drunken free-for-all that destroys the dining hall and everything in it. So much for charity and good works, Buñuel seems to be saying.

Two other Buñuel films containing meals deserve mention. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) the entire movie is a running gag about a group of people who keep trying to get together to eat dinner but each time are interrupted before they can actually sit down and begin, a cinematic exploration of endlessly delayed gratification. In The Exterminating Angel (1962) the situation is inverted, when a group of dinner guests do eat an elaborate meal but afterwards find themselves trapped, eventually abandoning all efforts at civilized behavior and finally dying.

•Babette's Feast, Gabriel Axel (1987). This Danish movie, an Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, culminates with an extended and richly detailed depiction of a lavish multi-course banquet, from its elaborate preparation to its lengthy consumption. The meal is prepared by Babette (Stéphane Audran), the French housekeeper to two elderly, unmarried Danish sisters who want to honor the 100th anniversary of the birth of their late father, a minister. The bleakness of the setting, a small Danish village, and the austerity of the sisters' lifestyle form a striking contrast to the colorful, exotic, and sensuous meal. For Babette, the meal is a means both of reliving the epicurean traditions of her homeland and of treating her friends and neighbors to a voluptuous culinary experience that is beyond their experience and imagination.

A number of films from the late 1980's and 1990's are constructed around the vivid onscreen presentation of food. Other examples are Tampopo (1986), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Eat Man Drink Woman (1994), even in a sense the movies Big Night (1996) and Chocolat (2000). Having chosen Babette's Feast as representative of this type of movie, I'm going to concentrate for the rest of the post on films in which food and dining are not so much ends in themselves but instead serve the interests of the narrative, are used to make a specific point, or pop up in unexpected places.

•Stagecoach, John Ford (1939). In this, to my mind the best Western ever made, an assorted group of travelers is thrown together for a dangerous stagecoach journey through Apache territory. Among them are the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), on his way to jail, and a prostitute named Dallas (Claire Trevor), who has been run out of her last town and is on her way to a new one. When the stagecoach stops for the night at a remote outpost, the characters assemble for dinner. But Dallas is shunned by the others, who refuse to eat at her end of the table. Ringo then moves from their end of the table to hers and shares his meal with her. This innocent act of friendship (it's unclear whether he actually realizes that she is a prostitute) leads to a chaste romantic attachment and at the end of the movie Dallas's promise to wait for Ringo until he is released from prison. In Ford's world view, these two characters are ennobled by their lack of hypocrisy, and redemption is possible through non-judgmental respect for another as simply a fellow human being. And that redemption has its germ in this one meal.

•Citizen Kane, Orson Welles (1941). In this legendary film, the main character is married to a woman who gradually grows to despise him for, among other things, his infidelity. The growing distance between the two is conveyed literally in a brief montage of breakfast scenes. In each scene the two are shown at opposite ends of the table in a medium-long shot, Kane on the left, his wife on the right, with the table between separating them. In each successive shot the table grows longer and the distance between the two increases, until finally Kane is at the far left-hand side of the screen and his wife at the far right-hand side. Their estrangement is further underscored when each begins to read the newspaper at breakfast, completely obscuring his face from the other. In a final stroke, Kane is shown to be reading the newspaper he publishes, while his wife is shown to be reading a rival publication.

•Tom Jones, Tony Richardson (1963). Tom (Albert Finney) has been wrongly evicted from his boyhood home through the machinations of his evil step-cousin. On the road he encounters one Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman), who is in the process of being hanged by a renegade Redcoat (presumably after being raped). He rescues Mrs. Waters and takes her to an inn to spend the night. Before retiring, they share an unforgettable meal. They attack their food in a mountingly orgiastic (puns intended) frenzy of degustation, their glances at each other becoming more lascivious and the atmosphere more erotically charged with each course. Finally, unable to bear the tension any longer, they race upstairs to a room and begin to tear off each other's clothes. Never has the connection between food and sex been so graphically depicted in a movie.

•Alice Adams, George Stevens (1935). This movie contains one of the most memorably funny dining scenes ever. The young Katharine Hepburn, exaggerating her mannerisms and accent to the point of artificiality, is the socially ambitious Alice Adams, daughter of a working-class family who longs to be accepted by the snobbish upper-class social set of her small Midwestern town. When she meets rich young Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray) at a society dance, she sets her cap at him and eventually invites him to dine with her family. In planning this meal, Alice goes all out to impress Arthur and to represent her family as of a higher social status than they really are. But the dinner turns out to be a complete and hilarious disaster, as everything goes wrong. The evening is miserably hot and humid, and the rich and heavy menu Alice has chosen is wholly inappropriate to the weather. Alice's family are uncomfortable in their unfamiliar formal clothing. And the family's housekeeper (Hattie McDaniel), forced to wear a ridiculous maid's outfit, is rebellious and cantankerous for the whole meal. Her disgusted expression each time the absurd, frilly little tiara she is wearing wilts in the heat and slips down her face and she must again push it back into place clearly expresses her opinion that the whole charade is nonsense that won't fool anyone. Arthur reacts to the disastrous situation with aplomb, but as things go from bad to worse, Alice, frantically trying to maintain her composure, becomes more and more overwrought, and her behavior becomes increasingly more mannered and brittle. Stevens successfully evokes conflicting emotional reactions in the viewer, for as funny as Alice's comeuppance is, you just can't help at the same time feeling her humiliation.

•The Gold Rush, Charles Chaplin (1925). Much of the first part of this movie is about food, as prospectors in Gold Rush Alaska struggle to keep from starving to death during the harsh winter. Chaplin uses the situation to devise many very funny gags. But perhaps the funniest of all is the Thanksgiving dinner that Charlie, holed up in a snowbound cabin, cooks for himself and his surly companion. The main course? A leather boot. The sequence in which Chaplin boils the boot then serves and eats it is one of the classics of cinema. His mimicry of a waiter in a formal restaurant as he serves it, separating the upper from the sole as though boning a fish and dishing up the shoelaces like pasta, his facial expressions as he determinedly forces himself to eat the boot (I seem to recall reading that it was actually made of licorice), all the while gazing wistfully into the middle distance as if trying to will away the bleakness of the situation, and after he eats the last bite delicately sucking the nails as though they were succulent bones—every inventive moment of the scene is funny.

Later in the movie a second great eating scene occurs when Charlie invites Georgia, the dance hall girl he has developed a crush on, and her friends to share his New Year's Eve dinner. Charlie cooks a big meal and entertains the girls with his famous dance of the rolls, one of the simplest and funniest movie gags ever devised, and one of the greatest. When the New Year's celebrations wake him up, Charlie realizes he has been stood up by the girls and has fallen asleep and dreamt the whole meal. The expression on his face in the few moments it takes him to understand what has happened is one of almost heartbreaking disappointment, and as the scene slowly fades out, you can almost sense Charlie's hopes fading with it. In just moments, the mood has gone from humor to pathos. Never were the two sides of Chaplin's sensibility and their fundamental inseparability expressed so succinctly as in this scene.

Thanks to C. K. Dexter Haven for suggesting Alice Adams. In Part 2 I'll be discussing eight more classic movies with memorable dining scenes. Until then, bon appétit!