TCM at 10pm: Luis Bunuels THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972) masterfully revealed the director as a true child of his century, making movies at the age of 72 with the bubbly confidence of a newcomer who has not yet learned what is possible and what is not possible cinematically. If TRISTANA (1970), was his KING LEAR, then DISCREET CHARM is his TEMPEST. Bunuel brings a scintillating surrealism to the profoundly simple idea that the middle class, out of a combination of boredom and indigestion, are dreaming their own destruction. The filmmaker mellowed marvelously in the jump from the starved captives of THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962) to the gastronomic gadabouts of DISCREET CHARM, to the point that, instead of hectoring, he obviously preferred exchanging naughty, non-sequiter, smoking-lounge tales with his bourgeois friends. His farcial facade of sobriety was never more persuasive than it is here in dissolving the thin line between what the eye sees and what the mind dreams.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 23:52:37 +0000
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