The A posteriori le cinema series is an opportunity to celebrate the 7e art by revisiting key titles that celebrate important anniversaries.
Six well-to-do friends try unsuccessfully to get together for a meal: it’s hard to imagine a slimmer pretext for a movie. And yet! Not without genius, Luis Buñuel built a whole film around this starting point, offering in doing so one of his best vintages: The discreet charm of the bourgeoisiereleased 50 years ago, in September 1972. Back to a masterpiece of surrealism, fantasy and satire, which has not aged a bit.
You must know that The discreet charm of the bourgeoisieas The ghost of freedom and That Obscure Object of Desire that followed him, almost never saw the light of day. Indeed, in 1970, Luis Buñuel announced — in the wake of the release of Tristanawhere he reunited with Catherine Deneuve three years after the international triumph of Beautiful day — decided to withdraw. The reason ? The filmmaker of Spanish origin, naturalized Mexican, now had the impression of repeating himself.
Precisely, the motif of repetition had long been one of his cinematographic obsessions… With his friend and writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière, he undertook the writing of a screenplay in which this motif would be the driving force.
“Buñuel had a single keyword for the film: rehearsal. An action that would be repeated, ”confirmed the late Jean-Claude Carrière in an interview produced for the 4K anniversary edition of the film. Alas, despite their enthusiasm, the two men quickly ended up in a narrative dead end. They were about to give up when their producer Serge Silberman, annoyed like them, told them an anecdote that changed everything.
A few weeks earlier, Silberman had met two other producers he knew in Paris. Spontaneously, he invited them to dinner the following Tuesday, forgetting that he would be in London at that time. On the appointed day, the two visitors presented themselves at their host’s, where a Mme Silberman stunned, confused and already in her nightgown.
“Buñuel and I looked at each other and said to ourselves that it was a fantastic start to a film, remembered Jean-Claude Carrière in the same interview. The idea of people trying to eat together but can’t, that had never been done. […] We started again like this, from a true story. »
Insolence and assurance
The anecdote inspired the opening sequence of the film, as Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier and Paul Frankeur arrive in evening dress at Stéphane Audran’s house ready to go to bed (Jean-Pierre Cassel plays the absent husband). Nothing being ready, the group goes to a nearby inn renowned for its good food.
The place is deserted, but open, they are reassured. Everyone sits down, when suddenly, tears rise: in an adjoining room, the owner of the premises, who has just died, is watched over. Hop! The cohort leaves, their appetite cut off.
From misunderstandings to the most preposterous setbacks, because less and less anchored in reality, each attempt ends in failure in a memorable escalation. For example, when they finally manage to gather around the same table, the protagonists observe with horror that they are in fact on a stage, unwitting stars of a boulevard whose text they have not learned. .
As critic Adrian Martin analyzed in a 2021 essay published by Criterion: “The more this simple narrative device repeats itself, the more it makes the action seem ostensibly absurd and dreamlike. Meanwhile, as the polite facade of normality slowly cracks, other human desires aside from the need for food gradually take hold, taking over the narrative: impulsive sex acts and equally impulsive murder. , for example. The film becomes more and more outrageous, scandalous, even blasphemous, while remaining perfectly calm and controlled on the surface. This combination was a specialty of Buñuel, performed here with renewed insolence and assurance. »
And that’s not to mention the different technique, in that it was enhanced here with sequence shots, zooms and tracking shots, a first for Buñuel, who had hitherto been more in love with static shots. In short, after considering himself out of breath, Buñuel found a second wind.
To continue Martin, admiringly: “ The discreet charm is a film that constantly deconstructs itself while building itself. This is why viewers find it so difficult to retain a clear image of the film in their memory, and why a subsequent viewing always reveals what may have passed under the perceptual radar the previous time. In its unique, dazzling and delicious way, The discreet charm manages to be that kind of impossible object that few artists manage to deliver: a kaleidoscopic film made up of open episodes, details and fragments that is nonetheless a spellbinding whole unified. »
Bitter and angry
The film was very well received, both by the public and by critics, and won the Oscar for best foreign film. At the time, Jacques Lourcelles qualified him in Presence of cinema from: “Fantastic and metaphysical vaudeville […] A story with drawers where the imagination of the characters and their social reality intertwine in such a way as to constantly arouse the amazement, the laughter and the complicity of the spectator. »
As in several of his films, Buñuel plays with contrasts and oppositions for humorous ends, for example constantly bringing back the theme of death (with striking bloody ghosts) in scenes where food and life are discussed. A favorite target, the clergy takes it for its cold, with the character of the bishop, who is also the gardener of one of the bourgeois couples, or the Church at the service of the rich.
Certainly, the protagonists have the charm of the title, but they are hypocritical, deceitful, lazy, dishonest, even criminal… A less than rosy portrait, but how suave. Among Buñuel’s best shots, we note the presence of Stéphane Audran, then wife and muse of Claude Chabrol, a filmmaker who would destroy the bourgeois if ever there was one. The star of The unfaithful wifeof Just before dark and red wedding had for the account shared the poster in Breakingstill from Chabrol, with the one who plays her husband in The discreet charm of the bourgeoisieJean-Pierre Cassel.
However, if the rather whimsical style of Buñuel is apparently at the antipodes of the causticity of Chabrol, under the surface, the two filmmakers come together. As Andrew Taylor summarizes in an anniversary analysis of the Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie recently published on Collider: “The title suggests an unpretentious comedy of manners, but the film is bitter and angry. Referring to the main characters as “bourgeois” might seem antiquated, but their selfishness and arrogance are all too familiar — we now know them by other names. »
The missing qualifier
A word, finally, on the title, perhaps one of the most inspired in the history of cinema. After two years of work on the screenplay, a record for them, Buñuel and Carrière could not find it. So they agreed to imagine about ten each, then to choose the one that would satisfy them both.
After Carrière had drawn a blank with his people, Buñuel suggested The charm of the bourgeoisie. Carrière did not say no, but pointed out that “charm” lacked a qualifier. He suggested “discreet”. Joy !
Eager to celebrate this find, Buñuel and Carrière sat down at a table in an inn…deserted. Déjà vu ? Arriving at their level, a butler with a serious expression told them: “De Gaulle is dead. No, the late general wasn’t on display in the next room, but the episode nonetheless powerfully evoked the paradoxical weirdness of the inn scene in their script. Thus, even before the shooting of the film, reality caught up with “surreality”.