The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Brilliant (and brilliantly titled) … The unique creation of a director who, at 72, has never been more fully in control of his talents, as a filmmaker, a moralist, social critic, and humourist.”

Vincent Canby, New York Times

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is one of Buñuel’s most hilarious films, an Oscar-winning (Best Foreign Film, 1972) assault on a ruling class living in fear of its imminent demise and clinging stubbornly to its empty rituals. Modifying and updating the central motif of Buñuel’s made-in-Mexico The Exterminating Angel (1962), which had a group of bourgeoisie mysteriously unable to leave a polite dinner party, Discreet Charm sees its privileged protagonists, five fashionable French and a fascist Latin American ambassador, constantly thwarted in their efforts to sit down to a civilized meal. Guests show up on the wrong day; restaurants are out of everything on the menu; terrorists burst in; dreams—and dreams within dreams—intrude, including that ultimate bourgeois nightmare: a dinner party where everyone actually says what they think! Arriving in a brand-new anniversary restoration, Buñuel’s biggest critical and commercial success is ​“an avant-garde sitcom” (J. Hoberman, New York Times) still riotous 50 years later.

“A masterpiece … Buñuel has arrived at a form that covers his full range, permits him to say anything—a form that literally and figuratively lets him get away with murder.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Sight and Sound

“Clearly the film of the year … Greatness is often confused with lumpy massivity and monumentality; on the contrary, Buñuel’s movie is the lightest of all cinematic souffles.”

Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice