Somewhere within the miles of celluloid, Luis Bunuel could be heard snickering to himself as he put these hapless socialites through the most absurd situations as he made them, in a parallel world, walk through fields of green down a road that seems to lead to somewhere but proves to be a road to nowhere.
Isn't it an overwhelming experience to meet a director's work just at the moment he's at his peak form? The exhilaration of letting his vision come through to you, invade your senses, and make the exact connections, has to be of the most intimate kind -- mind to heart. If and when that happens, you can safely say you are in the hands of a master of visual storytelling.
Luis Bunuel was seventy-two when he directed his Oscar-winning film LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE. This is the age period when many directors tend to lose their touch and favor some excess baggage or poor storytelling in lieu of sharp execution. Virtually every director who has reached this late period in life and is still working has the tendency to suffer at the encroaching shadow of death. Just look at the work of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen (who since MATCH POINT is on his way back to form), Kubrick's last movie EYES WIDE SHUT, to name a few.
Not Bunuel. Right up untl his last movie -- CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DESIR -- he was razor-sharp, keen, and as subtle as a bulldozer, and that's why this film is one of his best and a fascinating work of art. The story of six socialites who can never seem to consummate a simple social act -- in this case, dining -- due to the most implausible of things is in one way a version of his 1962 film EL ANGEL EXTERMINADOR, but where in that film there was no way out of a house, here all of the characters are in constant freedom. That is, until Bunuel reveals his fangs and decides he's gotten tired of playing cat and mouse with this horrendously vapid, vicious people.
Hearkening back to L'AGE D'OR, Bunuel revisits the themes he introduced in that film: couples needing to make love in their own garden, causing an uproar, or upright citizens committing crimes against defenseless people (in this case, a member of the clergy who gets reunited with the man who killed his parents and who pretends to absolve the dying man before shooting him in the head, a hysterical high point). One could argue that there seems to be no point in going around in circles... but then again, aren't the lives of these "rich and famous" equally pointless? Aren't these the kind of people who would look down at anyone who wasn't a part of their social circle? Aren't these the same people who, despite living a life of complacency, also have their own dabbling in the underbelly of society -- drug trade -- and have become the inevitable targets of terrorists who would rather eradicate them from the face of this Earth?
Ironically, the Surrealist elements of the movie are less to be remembered due to the fact that they're not meant to shock as much as to be a part of the "plot", itself as absurd as a pie in the sky or a Magritte painting. A man is tortured with some odd device inside a piano as the camera pans away to show cockroaches pouring out from inside it, a slight nod to the odd piano sequence from UN CHIEN ANDALOU. The jailer is shown bleeding, at death's door, freeing the six socialites -- a nod to the bleeding man in L'AGE D'OR. A soldier tells his own story of discovering his father wasn't his father via his dead mother who appears in a way similar to the way ghosts tend to manifest themselves in Asian horror films. And of course, whenever there needs to be an logical explanation of things, Bunuel incorporates big, booming sounds, essentially telling us that he could care less of the machinations of things. Because after all, this is a man who was never at ease explaining films, and who made them because this was his way of expressing himself. And in making movies for himself, he made movies for the masses who could get his warped but irreverent view of humanity.
Isn't it an overwhelming experience to meet a director's work just at the moment he's at his peak form? The exhilaration of letting his vision come through to you, invade your senses, and make the exact connections, has to be of the most intimate kind -- mind to heart. If and when that happens, you can safely say you are in the hands of a master of visual storytelling.
Luis Bunuel was seventy-two when he directed his Oscar-winning film LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE. This is the age period when many directors tend to lose their touch and favor some excess baggage or poor storytelling in lieu of sharp execution. Virtually every director who has reached this late period in life and is still working has the tendency to suffer at the encroaching shadow of death. Just look at the work of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen (who since MATCH POINT is on his way back to form), Kubrick's last movie EYES WIDE SHUT, to name a few.
Not Bunuel. Right up untl his last movie -- CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DESIR -- he was razor-sharp, keen, and as subtle as a bulldozer, and that's why this film is one of his best and a fascinating work of art. The story of six socialites who can never seem to consummate a simple social act -- in this case, dining -- due to the most implausible of things is in one way a version of his 1962 film EL ANGEL EXTERMINADOR, but where in that film there was no way out of a house, here all of the characters are in constant freedom. That is, until Bunuel reveals his fangs and decides he's gotten tired of playing cat and mouse with this horrendously vapid, vicious people.
Hearkening back to L'AGE D'OR, Bunuel revisits the themes he introduced in that film: couples needing to make love in their own garden, causing an uproar, or upright citizens committing crimes against defenseless people (in this case, a member of the clergy who gets reunited with the man who killed his parents and who pretends to absolve the dying man before shooting him in the head, a hysterical high point). One could argue that there seems to be no point in going around in circles... but then again, aren't the lives of these "rich and famous" equally pointless? Aren't these the kind of people who would look down at anyone who wasn't a part of their social circle? Aren't these the same people who, despite living a life of complacency, also have their own dabbling in the underbelly of society -- drug trade -- and have become the inevitable targets of terrorists who would rather eradicate them from the face of this Earth?
Ironically, the Surrealist elements of the movie are less to be remembered due to the fact that they're not meant to shock as much as to be a part of the "plot", itself as absurd as a pie in the sky or a Magritte painting. A man is tortured with some odd device inside a piano as the camera pans away to show cockroaches pouring out from inside it, a slight nod to the odd piano sequence from UN CHIEN ANDALOU. The jailer is shown bleeding, at death's door, freeing the six socialites -- a nod to the bleeding man in L'AGE D'OR. A soldier tells his own story of discovering his father wasn't his father via his dead mother who appears in a way similar to the way ghosts tend to manifest themselves in Asian horror films. And of course, whenever there needs to be an logical explanation of things, Bunuel incorporates big, booming sounds, essentially telling us that he could care less of the machinations of things. Because after all, this is a man who was never at ease explaining films, and who made them because this was his way of expressing himself. And in making movies for himself, he made movies for the masses who could get his warped but irreverent view of humanity.