The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

A bourgeois couple, the Thévenots (Frankeur and Seyrig), accompany M. Thévenot's colleague Rafael Acosta (Rey), who is the ambassador from the fictional South American nation of Miranda, and Mme. Thévenot's sister Florence (Ogier), to the house of the Sénéchals, the hosts of a dinner party. Once they arrive, Alice Sénéchal (Audran) is surprised to see them and explains that she expected them the following evening and has no dinner prepared. The would-be guests then invite Mme Sénéchal to join them for dinner at a nearby inn.

Arriving at the inn, the party finds it locked. They knock and are reluctantly invited in by a waitress who mentions that the restaurant is under new management. Inside, there are no diners, and the prices on the menu are disconcertingly low. The party hears wailing from an adjoining room and discovers a vigil for the corpse of the manager, who died a few hours earlier. The party is told that the coroner is coming soon, but they hurriedly depart.

Later, at the Embassy of Miranda, Acosta meets with MM. Thévenot and Sénéchal to discuss the proceeds of a large cocaine deal. During the meeting, Acosta sees a young woman selling clockwork-animal toys on the footpath outside the embassy. He shoots one of the toys with a rifle and the woman runs off. He explains that she is part of a terrorist group.

Two days later, the bourgeois friends attempt to have lunch at the Sénéchals', but Henri and his wife escape to the garden to have sex instead of joining them. One of the friends takes this to mean that the Sénéchals know the police are coming and left to avoid arrest for their involvement in drug trafficking. The party again leaves in a panic.

When the Sénéchals return from the garden, their friends are gone, but they meet a bishop who has donned their gardener's clothing. They throw him out, but when he returns wearing his bishop's robes, they embrace him with deference. The bishop asks to work for them as their gardener. He tells them about his childhood — that his parents were murdered by arsenic poisoning and that the culprit was never apprehended. (Later in the film, he goes to visit a dying man who turns out to be his parents' murderer; after blessing the man, the bishop kills him with a shotgun.)

The women visit a teahouse just as it has run out of all beverages – tea, coffee, and milk – although it finally turns out they do have water. While they are waiting, a soldier tells them about his childhood: how after his mother's death his cold-hearted father sent him to military school. The ghost of the soldier's mother informed him that the man was not his real father, but his father's killer; they had dueled over his mother. Following the ghost's request, the soldier killed the culprit with poison.

Mme. Thévenot meets Acosta at his apartment. They are having an affair but are interrupted by a visit from her husband, whereupon she makes a convenient excuse and leaves with him. Acosta is next visited by the young Maoist terrorist who has come to kill him. He ambushes and chastises her, then tells her to leave when she refuses his advances; his agents capture her and take her away.

Several abortive dinner parties ensue; interruptions include the arrival of a group of army officers and enlisted men who join the dinner only to be called away for alarmingly close military maneuvers, the revelation that a colonel's dining room is a stage set in a theatrical performance for an audience that is angry with the actors for not knowing their lines, the ambassador's shooting of the colonel after he insults the nation of Miranda and slaps the ambassador, the arrest and release of the bourgeois friends, and their summary execution by a hit squad. Most if not all of these scenes turn out to be dream sequences in which ghosts make frequent appearances.

A recurring scene throughout the film, of the six people walking silently and purposefully on a long, isolated country road, is also the final sequence.

The film was a box office hit in both Europe and the US, and critically praised.[8] Roger Ebert called it a comedy but noted that Buñuel’s comedies were “more like a dig in the ribs, sly and painful.”[9] Robert Benayoun said that it was "perhaps [Buñuel's] most direct and most 'public' film".[10] Vincent Canby wrote in his 1972 review of the film, “In addition to being extraordinarily funny and perfectly acted, The Discreet Charm moves with the breathtaking speed and self-assurance that only a man of Buñuel’s experience can achieve without resorting to awkward ellipsis.”[11] Buñuel later said that he was disappointed with the analysis that most film critics made of the film.[10] He also disliked the film's promotional poster, depicting a pair of lips with legs and a derby hat.[8]

Buñuel and Silberman travelled to the US in late 1972 to promote the film. Buñuel did not attend his own press screening in Los Angeles and told a reporter at Newsweek that his favorite characters in the film were the cockroaches. While visiting LA, Buñuel, Carrière and Silberman were invited to a lunch party by Buñuel's old friend George Cukor, and other guests included Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Rouben Mamoulian, John Ford, William Wyler, Robert Mulligan and Robert Wise[12] (resulting in a famous photograph of the directors together, other than an ailing Ford). Fritz Lang was unable to attend, but Buñuel visited him the following day and received an autographed photo from Lang, one of his favorite directors.[13]

In October 2014, Stephen Sondheim revealed that he and playwright David Ives were working on a new musical with a plot inspired by both The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Luis Buñuel's film The Exterminating Angel (1962).[14]

• Bourgeois personality
• List of French submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
• List of submissions to the 45th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film

• Kinder, Marsha (1999). Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56831-5.

• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at IMDb
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at AllMovie
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at Rotten Tomatoes
• Roger Ebert's review of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie - Film (Movie) Plot and Review - Publications