A diamond mine is taken over by the transparently fascist military government of a strategically unnamed town, so the workers go out and protest their forced unemployment. After the locals are scared off by firing squads, a man from out of town saunters through the scene and raises two middle fingers to the armed soldiers, and it's immediately obvious that this film is Buñuel flipping his own middle fingers at the Franco dictatorship in Spain. Definitely…
The inescapability of poverty
Pedro and El Jaibo's relationship is a perfect microcosm of Buñuel's message here. Two boys living in a slum in Mexico; Pedro wants to become a better person so that his mom will love him, but Jaibo selfishly sabotages him at every turn.
Pedro gets a job at a local blacksmith, but Jaibo visits him and steals a knife. Pedro is blamed and fired. Pedro goes to a reform school, where he…
"I went through a great shock, I am only trying to recover."
Such a deeply cynical film that you can feel Buñuel's hatred for the fascist Franco dictatorship in the very texture of every frame. The world itself is a test of Viridiana's faith, continually confronting her with the darkest depths of humanity's sinful depravity, rewarding her conviction with nothing but more hardship, asking at every turn, "What about now? Do you still believe?" How is…
Fairly straightforward melodrama (by Buñuel's standards, at least) about Tristana, a woman who loses her parents and is taken in by Don Lope, an old, bankrupt aristocrat.
The central theme here is sexual boundaries: Lope falls in love with Tristana despite describing himself as both her father and her husband (the incest vibes are strong here), and despite having disproportionate power over her (he's also her guardian, and occasionally treats her like a servant). Their relationship,…
This one seems to be all about the ways that fundamentalism perverts religion, how it turns it into a self-serving ideology rather than a humanistic and altruistic system of faith.
It's essentially a series of satirical presentations of stubborn ideologues who won't give even the slightest ground regarding their religious dogma, but who are also willing to change their beliefs when it suits them, and then throw coffee (or tea? hard to tell in the scene)…
So, from what I can tell, there are three things going on here, three central elements to this film. There's, you know, the central plot, a story about an old man and a much younger woman and their various romantic entanglements; there's the framing device, the fact that our protagonist, the much older man, is telling this story to a group of passengers he just met on a train car; and there's the violent environmental backdrop,…
At some point in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (any sense of time, whether diegetic or otherwise, quickly becomes meaningless as scene after scene ends with a character waking up and reflecting, "What a strange dream I've just had…"), the main characters go to a dinner party at a colonel's house where they're served fake plastic chicken, and then a large curtain is pulled back to reveal a theater audience. The dinner guests bashfully mumble…
"Antisocial, it ejects the intruder on its solitude." Wow, okay, geez Luis, kinda rude to call me out like that.
Honestly most of this is too opaque for me to really make heads or tails of, at least in its entirety, although I did enjoy the general mockery of the bourgeoisie and the derision of high-class living throughout. A few sequences that connected for me:
The central narrative throughline is a Man and a Woman are…
Is Séverine a sympathetic protagonist? Are we supposed to like her? I don't think characters have to be sympathetic in order to be "good" or well written, obviously, and I don't care about authorial intent; what I mean to say is that there are seemingly two ways to frame this story: as the struggle of a sexually repressed woman to come to terms with the coordinates of her own desire, or as the destructive whimsy of…
"France for the French"
Nationalists are a bunch of criminals, racists, pedophiles, rapists, and murderers. Hey, don't look at me! It's all Buñuel! That's just what the movie's about!
Hard to call the way the aristocracy treats its servants "micro"-aggressions when the old man basically wants to masturbate at you while you walk around in his old-ass leather boots.
God, I love how unapologetically dogmatic this movie is. Joseph is hilarious:
Marianne: "Why do you talk…
For me—so far, at least—Buñuel's funniest
Žižek made the most salient point about this in his Pervert's Guides: it's all about ideology. The movie is funny because it imagines a world where everything is exactly the same, but the ideology has shifted three degrees to the left, has been heightened and exaggerated, has been flipped upside-down.
A dinner party turns into a bathroom party, everyone sitting on toilets instead of chairs, with a private dining room…
"They'll be ashamed when they look back on their behavior."
Spoilers? I don't know what's a spoiler for movies like this. If you think it's possible for me to spoil this movie for you and you think that might be a bad thing, probably don't read this.
So, like, what's going on here, exactly? A bunch of Fancy People are invited to a Fancy Party with a Fancy Dinner and all that, they stay up way…