The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Bunuel, 1972)Bourgeoisie has to be one of the least phonetic words ever. It should be spelled Borzwagé and make films Junior likes.
Anyway, based on the title and the Netflix blurb, I had some hopes for the film as a biting satire of the upper crust. The start is a bit slow and uncertain about where things are headed. The first attempt of the main group of friends to dine certainly has them behaving in a snobbish manner, but it doesn't immediately build on it. It took the first main hint of supernatural or surreal elements to convince me that something a bit more complex was going on. In some of the early scenes I saw things that could well have influenced some of the visuals for Tommy a few years later and something similar to the same year Monty Python cheese shop sketch (in this case a tea shop that is out of tea and everything else but water).
My first thought on seeing Jean-Pierre Cassel's name in the credits was "I wonder if that is Vincent's father" and upon seeing him one has no doubt. As an aside, in double checking that I see Vincent Cassel was married to Monica Bellucci prior to Irreversible. I guess that explains the incredible chemistry.
I appreciate certain things here and it is certainly better than having your eye cut by a razor. To use our classifications from the other thread, Bunuel tends strongly toward the artistic (and when failing, pretentious) than what I'd call the intelligent. He creatively hints at stuff but he doesn't really
say as much. I recognize more than appreciate his talent.
Also too, since this is a film with dreams it is automatically perfectly comparable and better than Inception which everyone knows is the worst thing ever to use the word dream. Oddly I wrote this before I saw Bill throw out the Inception comparison in his review of a film with dreams.
Seriously though, they don't even come close to trying to use dreams to the same purpose.
As a followup to my "when Lynch has bad acting it is praised, when The Room has bad acting it is taunted" line of critique, when Luis Bunuel has plot inconsistencies it is surreal, when The Room has plot inconsistencies it is poor filmmaking. Double standards and intensions and stuff. Blah.