Day 44: Ceci N'est Pas Un Film (or The Treachery of Cinema)

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972)
Directed by Luis Bunuel
Starring: Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Ogier, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julien Bertheau

A group of upper-class friends gather together for a dinner party.  The only problem is, every time they sit down to eat, they're interrupted by many strange goings-on which range from minor annoyances to inexplicable surrealist scenarios. 

Every film student is required to at least once to watch Luis Bunuel's surrealistic masterpieces Un Chien Andalou and L'age D'or.  Both of those films (done with varying degrees of collaboration with Salvador Dali) are filled to the brim with surrealist and avant garde imagery, designed to either make the audience chuckle with delight or fume with anger, depending on the sensibilities of the viewer.  And that's the sort of thing I was expecting going into this film.  But what I got was very light on the shocking images and very heavy on dialogue that is critical of everything from world politics to religion and everything in between.  The most surreal thing about the movie is the world in which it takes place, which makes perfect sense to those who live in it, but not to outsiders (like the audience). 

Now I'm a big fan of strange cinema.  David Lynch is one of my favorite directors, and his films Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive are on my top ten list of favorite films.  I also love Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and P.T. Anderson's Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love.  For me, the weirder, the better.  But this film came off like a drunk friend who's trying to tell a joke and forgets the punchline. 

But the thing is, maybe I just didn't get it the first time around.  Or maybe I don't know what I think.  My first impression of the film is that it's exasperatingly boring.  That's probably because I was expecting something totally off the wall and got a world that was off the wall, but so close to our own I didn't realize it.  I was monumentally confused by the whole thing.  But the great thing about DVD's is that we can go back and watch it again.  And I plan to do that.

From what I've been reading, the film has been called "Bunuel's joke on his audience."  Perhaps the joke is that I was looking at face-value for the outlandish stuff and missing the whole point.  But love or hate this movie, you will have an opinion of it, which is the best thing a movie can do.  The worst thing is to make a movie no one cares about or completely ignores.  If you can't move an audience one way or another, you've got no business making movies.