Half a century of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

On September 15, 1972, Luis Buñuel's film " Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)" was released in French cinemas.

The film serves as one more illustration of the fairness of Anna Akhmatova's lines “If only you knew what kind of rubbish poetry grows from, knowing no shame ...” The same, it turns out, is quite true for films. Including those that are recognized by many as masterpieces.

After the film "Tristana" (1970), Luis Buñuel was about to stop his directorial activity, because he came to the conclusion that he began to repeat himself in his work. These reflections coincided with a meeting with his old colleague and partner, Serge Silberman, who had produced Buñuel's two previous films. Silberman, as an anecdote, told the director about the event that had happened to him, when six of his friends, whom the producer invited to a dinner party and completely forgot about the invitation, rushed to him.

The combination of the theme of repetition and the failed dinner party gave Buñuel the idea of ​​creating a script that interested Silberman. The producer gave Buñuel and his former co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière $2,000 to develop the script for the new film. It took Buñuel and Carriere three weeks to write the script. Initially, the script was called " Down with Lenin, or The Virgin in the Manger."

After writing the script, it took Silberman a whole year to raise the $800,000 (equivalent to $5.8 million in 2022) needed to shoot the film. After the required amount was collected, Buñuel started filming and finished it in two months.

In early 1973, Luis Buñuel's “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” was nominated for the American Golden Globe Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has given preference to Swedish director Jan Troell's dilogy “Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) / Nybyggarna (The New Land)”. Together with Buñuel's film, the "relative loser" of the award was the masterpiece of another Swedish director - Ingmar Bergman - "Whispers and Cries".

Also in 1973, Luis Buñuel's film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" received two Oscar nominations and won the most important of them - Best Foreign Language Film. At the same time, Buñuel's picture outperformed Jan Troell's film "Nybyggarna (The New Land)” and Stanislav Rostotsky's film "... And the Dawns Here Are Quiet."

In 1974, Luis Buñuel's film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" received 5 nominations for the BAFTA British Academy Film Award, including in the most important categories - Best Film and Best Director. We can say that the film received one and a half awards. One for Best Screenplay, and Stéphane Odran won another half of the award, as she was awarded for her roles in two films (in order to save money). In the most important nominations, Luis Buñuel and his picture lost, respectively, to François Truffaut and his movie “La nuit américaine (Day for Night)”.

The vast majority of professional film critics gave Buñuel's film rave reviews. The guru of American film criticism, Roger Ebert, devoted two reviews to the film: in 1972 and in 2000. In both, he rated the film the highest in his rating system, four stars, and included it in his "Great Movies" list. At the same time, he begins his first review with words borrowed from Luis Buñuel himself: “The best explanation for this film is that from the point of view of pure reason there is no explanation.”

The well-known Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov also devoted two reviews to Buñuel's film: in 2006 and in 2016. At the same time, in the first review, he gives his explanation of the main meaning of the picture: “Religion and psychoanalysis, extremism and drugs, stiffness and swagger, and most importantly, endless, all kinds of, virtuoso, disgusting, vital and such pleasant machinations in literally any area of ​​life - it seems , none of the "modest charm" was left behind the scenes! And yet, according to the author’s insight, what is worse than all hellish torments put together is for the bourgeoisie not that deprivation, but even the restriction of His Majesty’s Consumption, and the symbol and essence of which is precisely the satisfaction of hunger (and other physiological needs) elevated to a special cult.

And in the second review, he sets a task for the moviegoer: “this time the director nevertheless leaves (generously leaves!) the sensitive and thinking viewer the opportunity to comprehend the harmonious and internally consistent logic of the development of on-screen events with the mind, and not only at the intuitive-subconscious level.” As the saying goes, "He who has eyes, let him see."

Judging by the ratings given to Buñuel's film on the IMDB and Kinopoisk sites, "a sensitive and thinking viewer" comprehended the logic of the film. 63% of the users of these resources gave the picture a score of 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Luis Bunuel's film "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" according to FilmGourmand version was 9,028, thanks to which it took 158th Rank in the Golden Thousand.