Friday, 12 February 2010

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie


Director: Luis Buñuel (1972)

What's the meaning of life if you have everything at least in the material, consumerist sense? Well, dinners apparently and social ritual involved. To eat and to fuck. And you can be as morally corrupted, rotten or stupid as it's possible without any shame as long as you know the right way how to drink martini dry and it is served in a glass of exactly the right size and shape, in other word as long as you exchange with others the right class indicator signals at the table. It's a harsh, absurd satire on upper class made by the great surrealist master Bunuel. One of his best known and most acclaimed movies that won Oscar as a best foreign film also.

It's almost absolutely plotless. A collage of dreams intertwined with reality in a way that you never really can understand where is the dream and where is reality, as both are equally beautiful (or ugly), meaningless and irrational. Their dreamlike life is not entirely perfect and they have their anxieties. They are distracted form time to time by poor peoples terrorists, by police who are on the track of their cocaine business or just by nightmares. However they always have the luxury and the option to walk away or wake up from the bad dream in all possible realities, because they have diplomatic immunities, power and money and all that sort of things. One of the worst dreams is when their social ritual is interrupted, when somebody brakes the rules of conduct of chattering class. You don't discuss with the ambassador of fictional Latin American country called Miranda the real state of affairs in his country. It's a NO-NO, a taboo. You risk to wake up from the dream and end up in a nightmare.

A dream within a dream within a dream and so the life goes and so the movie goes. The surreal adventures and dreams of characters are from time to time interrupted by the scene where all of them are walking down the road somewhere in the countryside seemingly from nowhere to nowhere. There is not a hint of location or whatever, just the road and the fields around. There is some sort of small competition between them (when making this scene Bunuel instructed each actor to try to go just a little bit faster than others) however it's almost unnoticeable. They do not run or struggle. The road is smooth and in general they are doing well as a group (or class).

Ritual, and their never ending dinners is just that, is something that goes from nowhere to nowhere, it's a repetition which main purpose and goal is to maintain the status quo in society. The one peculiar thing about ritual is that it somehow manages to create its own reality. Can it be crushed? Or it's just another dream to wake up form?

There is lot more in the film.

Weird reality, wonderful movie.

No comments:

Post a Comment