The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Made in 1972, near the triumphant end of Luis Buñuel's long career, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and stands as the most beguiling of his late French comedies. Working again with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the seventy-two-year-old director turned a deceptively simple comic premise into an elaborate structure of pure dream.

An impeccable ensemble — Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Paul Frankeur among them — plays a circle of affluent, well-mannered friends forever prevented, by ever more absurd interruptions, from sitting down to finish a meal together. Buñuel nests dreams within dreams within dreams, lets one reality dissolve without warning into another, and threads the whole with sly digs at the clergy, the diplomatic corps, the army and the drug trade, all delivered with the lightest and most genial of touches.

It was a critical triumph and remains one of the most accessible entry points into Buñuel's surrealism, its satire genial and playful where the earlier Viridiana had been savage. Elegant, very funny and quietly subversive, the film skewers the manners and self-regard of a whole class while never once raising its voice — the work of a master in serene old age, toying with the very form he had helped to invent half a century earlier, and finding fresh mischief in the simple act of dinner.