What if an entire film were based around characters sitting down for dinner but the meal never arrived? This is the whacked-out premise of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a deranged masterpiece from one of cinema’s greatest weirdos: the iconoclastic Spanish-Mexican auteur Luis Buñuel. He is best-known for sensationally strange and surreal productions that beam in from different planes of existence, telling stories that kind of make sense until, all of a sudden, they very much do not.
Buñuel’s 1929 short film Un Chien Andalou, which he co-wrote with Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, is perhaps his most famous work, notorious for its grotesque close-up shot of an eyeball. But The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which was released in 1972 and won an Academy award for best foreign language film, is his most financially successful and among his most acclaimed. The film is less a story per se than a scattered series of incidents involving a handful of hungry socialites including François (Paul Frankeur), Simone (Delphine Seyrig) and Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey), an ambassador from a South American nation.
