The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
PG, 100 m., 1972
Fernando Rey (Ambassador), Stephane Audran (Mrs. Scnechal), Delphine Seyrig (Mrs. Thevenot), Bulle Ogier (Florence), JeanPierre Cassel (Senechal), Michel Piccoli (Secretary of State). Directed by Luis Buñuel and produced by Serge Silberman. Screenplay by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere.
“The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation”
—Buñuel’s preface to
The Exterminating Angel
There is never quite an explanation in the universe of Luis Buñuel. His characters slip in and out of each other’s fantasies, driven by compulsions that are perhaps not even their own. Buñuel doesn’t like characters who have free will; if they inhabit his films, they will do what he tells them. And his fancies are as unpredictable as they are likely to be embarrassing.
His theme is almost always entrapment. His characters cannot get loose. He places them in either literal or psychological bondage, and forces them to watch with horror as he demonstrates the underlying evil of the universe. Buñuel is the most pessimistic of filmmakers, the most negative, certainly the most cynical. He is also the most obsessive, returning again and again to the same situations and predicaments; it’s as if filmmaking, for him, is a grand tour of his favorite fetishes.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (which won the Oscar as 1972’s best foreign film) has nothing new in it; but Buñuel admirers don’t want anything new. They want the same old stuff in a different way, and Buñuel doesn’t—perhaps cannot—disappoint them. The most interesting thing about Discreet Charm is the way he neatly reverses the situation in his Exterminating Angel (1967).
In that film, one of my favorites, a group of dinner guests finds itself in an embarrassing predicament: After dinner, no one can leave the drawing room. There is nothing to prevent them; the door stands wide open. But, somehow, they simply … can’t leave. They camp out on the floor for several days of gradually increasing barbarism, black magic, death, suicide, and visits from a bear and two sheep (which they capture and barbecue).
The film, as Buñuel noted in his opening title, makes no sense. Not that it needs to; it gives us an eerie feeling, and we look at his trapped characters with a mixture of pity and the notion that they got what was coming to them. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Buñuel reverses the mirror; this time, his characters are forever sitting down to dinner—but they never eat.
The consummation of their feast is prevented by a series of disasters—some real, some dreams, some obviously contrived to feed some secret itch of Buñuel’s. At first there is a simple misunderstanding; the guests have arrived on the wrong night. Later, at an inn, their appetites are spoiled when it develops that the owner has died and is laid out in the next room. Still later, there are interruptions from the army, the police … and the guests’ own dreams. All of the fantasies of public embarrassment are here, including a scene in which the guests sit down to eat and suddenly find themselves on a stage in front of an audience.
The movie isn’t about anything in particular, I suppose, although devoted symbolmongers will be able to make something of the ambassador who is a cocaine smuggler and the bishop who gets off by hiring himself out as a gardener. Buñuel seems to have finally done away with plot and dedicated himself to filmmaking on the level of pure personal fantasy.
Since the form of a movie is so much more important than the content anyway, this decision gives Buñuel’s immediately preceding films (Tristana, Belle de Jour) a feeling almost of relief. We are all so accustomed to following the narrative threads in a movie that we want to make a movie make “sense,” even if it doesn’t. But the greatest directors can carry us along breathlessly on the wings of their own imaginations, so that we don’t ask questions; we simply have an experience. Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers did that; now here comes old Buñuel to show that he can, too.
The 400 Blows
NO MPAA RATING, 99 m., 1959
Jean-Pierre Léaud (Antoine Doinel), Claire Maurier (Gilberte Doinel), Albert Rémy (Julien Doinel). Directed and produced by François Truffaut. Screenplay by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy.
I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.
—François Truffaut
François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) is one of the most intensely touching stories ever made about a young adolescent. Inspired by Truffaut’s own early life, it shows a resourceful boy growing up in Paris and apparently dashing headlong into a life of crime. Adults see him as a troublemaker. We are allowed to share some of his private moments, as when he lights a candle before a little shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. The film’s famous final shot, a zoom into a freeze frame, shows him looking directly into the camera. He has just run away from a house of detention and is on the beach, caught between land and water, between past and future. It is the first time he has seen the sea.
Antoine Doinel was played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who has a kind of solemn detachment, as if his heart had suffered obscure wounds long before the film began. This was the first in a long collaboration between actor and director; they returned to the character in the short film Antoine and Collette (1962) and three more features: Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979).
The later films have their own merits, and Stolen Kisses is one of Truffaut’s best, but The 400 Blows, with all its simplicity and feeling, is in a class by itself. It was Truffaut’s first feature, and one of the founding films of the French New Wave. We sense that it was drawn directly out of Truffaut’s heart. It is dedicated to André Bazin, the influential French film critic who took the fatherless Truffaut under his arm at a time when the young man seemed to stand between life as a filmmaker and life in trouble.
Little is done in the film for pure effect. Everything adds to the impact of the final shot. We meet Antoine when he is in his early teens, and living with his mother and stepfather in a crowded walk-up where they always seem to be squeezing out of each other’s way. The mother (Claire Maurier) is a blonde who likes tight sweaters and is distracted by poverty, by her bothersome son, and by an affair with a man from work. The stepfather (Albert Rémy) is a nice enough sort, easygoing, and treats the boy in a friendly fashion although he is not deeply attached to him. Both parents are away from home a lot, and neither has the patience to pay close attention to the boy: They judge him by appearances and by the reports of others who misunderstand him.
At school, Antoine has been typecast by his teacher (Guy Decomble) as a troublemaker. His luck is not good. When a pinup calendar is being passed from hand to hand, his is the hand the teacher finds it in. Sent to stand in the corner, he makes faces for his classmates and writes a lament on the wall. The teacher orders him to decline his offending sentence, as punishment. His homework is interrupted. Rather than return to school without it, he skips. His excuse is that he was sick. After his next absence, he says his mother has died. When she turns up at his school, alive and furious, he is marked as a liar.