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 it is the most beguiling of his late French comedies. Working again with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the seventy-two-year-old director built a deceptively simple comic premise into an elaborate structure of pure dream.

Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Paul Frankeur lead an impeccable ensemble as a circle of affluent, well-mannered friends who are forever prevented, by ever more absurd interruptions, from sitting down to finish a meal together. Buñuel nests dreams inside dreams inside dreams, lets one reality dissolve without warning into another, and threads the whole thing 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 is still one of the easiest ways into Buñuel's surrealism: the satire is genial and playful where the earlier Viridiana had been savage. It is elegant and very funny, and it skewers the manners and self-regard of a whole class without once raising its voice. This is an old master entirely at ease, toying with the very form he had helped to invent half a century earlier, and finding fresh mischief in the simple act of dinner.