Dinner for Six

By J.C

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE Directed by LUIS BUUEL Screenplay by LUIS BUNUEL and JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIERS

In The Exterminating Angel, Luis Bunuel, master of perverse magic and weaver of surreal spells, conjured up a dinner party that no one could leave. The guests were prisoners, not of the hosts or even of the house itself, but of each other, trapped by their own free will--victims, finally, of their own fantasies. It was a furious, scalding film, one of Bunuel's darkest and most unsparing.

Ten years later, this new film, his 29th, uses a device reminiscent of The Exterminating Angel. A small group of frivolous, well-heeled Parisians (Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Bulle Ogier, Paul Frankeur) sit down to a series of meals that are in some way either interrupted or totally disrupted. The movie is a skein of the guests' separate fantasies, each one originating with the recurring comic nightmare of a disastrous dinner. Bunuel, as if working an artful parlor trick, sometimes pulls one dream from inside another like a series of splendid silks.

The effect is dazzling, reminiscent of the British film Dead of Night (1946) that resolved itself as one dream enveloped by another. Each episode of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is consistently amusing and often hilariously shrewd. The film is a miniature Decameron woven together by a shot--repeated several times--of the six characters walking briskly along a country road. They are pilgrims in a bucolic purgatory, condemned by Bunuel for their militant mediocrity.

Rey, familiar not only from Bunuel's Viridiana and Tristana but also as the crafty dope smuggler in The French Connection, plays the ambassador of a country called Miranda; his exquisitely developed sense of hypocrisy binds him close to his Parisian friends and even closer to Miss Seyrig, a friend's wife with whom he is indulging a perfunctory passion. With his companions Cassel and Frankeur, he is also earning a tidy stipend on the side by smuggling cocaine in his inviolate diplomatic briefcase. Their only concern, besides the ambassadors incessant fear of revolutionaries, is "a gang in Marseille," which is beginning to resent the amateur trafficking. In one of the movie's best scenes, gang members break in while all are (of course) seated at dinner and slaughter everyone save Rey, who has taken shelter under the table. He is undone, in an elegantly malicious Bunuel touch, only when his hand reaches stealthily up from under the table to rescue a slice of rare lamb left on his plate.

Another dream, another dinner. Invited to the home of a general of the French army, the friends find themselves in a strange room that seems to have been hastily arranged. Suddenly, sharp shafts of light appear from the ceiling. The guests turn in their seats, a curtain rises, and a theater audience stares at them with mild anticipation. Subjected to the same kind of vaguely contemptuous scrutiny they usually employ themselves, the guests, as one, make for the wings.

The film is filled with many such eccentric japes, all aimed at some aspect of the bourgeoisie's amorality, their scornful detachment and their resulting obsession with manners and surfaces. If the film lacks quite as much force as it might have had, that is because the targets themselves have been pretty well battered by this time. The actors do all they can and work considerable charm; Rey, Seyrig and Audran are especially stylish.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie lacks the intense irony of The Exterminating Angel and Viridiana. The tone is farcical, the humor sharp but somehow never wounding. Bunuel could not ever be benign, but here he seems almost lighthearted. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is his most blithe and accessible work. We enjoy it, but at the same time we miss Bunuel's bite. qedJ.C.

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