Luis Bunuel Collection (Vol 2)

This film is not currently available on DVD. Film Description Three excellent 1970s films from the scourge of the bourgeoisie, hypocrisy and established religion. Features That Obscure Object of Desire, The Phantom of Liberty and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Film Details Director Luis Buñuel Starring Carole Bouquet, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Michel Piccoli   Country France Language FRENCH   Year 1972-77

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Review by Michael Brooke on 10th March 2005

When the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film was collected by a flamboyant figure sporting silver hair and mirrored shades, many in the audience must have assumed it was a glitzy European jet-setting producer. In fact, it was a heavily disguised Luis Buñuel, whose surprise at winning owed little to false modesty - a fortnight earlier he'd tried to sabotage his chances by claiming to have stumped up the Academy's requested bribe.

This incident sums up the paradoxes of Buñuel's final decade. Though as fiery in his condemnation of the social, political and psychological oppression of the ruling classes, the church and the bourgeoisie as ever, the anger of his earlier work is here subsumed into light-hearted playfulness: his targets are ultimately indestructible, but he can at least have fun with their foibles.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) perfectly encapsulates this. Six pillars of society repeatedly try to have dinner together, their plans interrupted by events both real (scheduling mix-ups, a restaurateur's death) and increasingly surreal (exposed on a theatre stage, assassinated by paramilitaries). But no matter how much Buñuel throws at them, they react with the unflappable sang-froid of the title, whose telling adjective "discreet" was added at the last minute. Alternately laugh-out-loud funny and disquietingly bizarre (its dream sequences rank among Buñuel's most uncannily vivid, a shot of cockroaches skittering over piano keys recalling Un Chien Andalou half a century earlier), it's the ideal introduction to his work.

It's released in tandem with its two successors, the more pointedly Surrealist The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), whose casting difficulties became an inspired conceit: Buñuel used two physically dissimilar actresses to represent facets of the same woman's persona, and was fascinated by the number of people who claimed not to notice.

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Article - "Luis Bunuel" by Andrew Hoellering
Saturday 1st April 2006

In Chien Andalou (1928) and L’Age d’Or (1930) Buñuel first enacted the surreal vision which never left him. He aimed to shock the viewer into a new awareness, omitting anything that could be explained or rationalised. What started as youthful jeu d’espr...  View article in full

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Black Comedies

Including: American Psycho, Arsenic and Old Lace, Brazil, Buffet Froid, Charlie Chaplin - Monsieur Verdoux, Dr Strangelove, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Eating Raoul, Fargo, Gremlins.

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