The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, by Luis Buñuel

In this film, Buñuel examines and criticizes, once again, the higher class of society by revealing the absurdities they engage in to maintain proper appearances and manners. He does so by using a surrealistic course of actions delineated by dreams within dreams.

The interaction of the bourgeoisie with other social strata is ridiculous, resulting on the opposite outcome the characters were trying to convey. The social class that is looked down becomes their own instead of the one they were criticizing and trying to ridicule. For example, after they explain the proper recipe and right ingredients to make a martini, they invite their driver to have a drink with them. They give him a martini and stare at him closely to point out how little class and education he has given the way he drank it. However, it is evident for everyone, except the bourgeois in the film, that the driver nervously drinks up his martini as fast as he can only because he wants to give an end to such an awkward situation. In this scene, the camera moves quickly into a close-up of the driver’s face, so the audience is able to scrutinize his actions like the rest of the people in the room. Because this camera movement places so much emphasis and focus on the martini, it presents with certainty the idea that he has been given poison instead of gin. Drinks and poison are recurrent themes in this film. Another example is the Bishop’s story about the death of his parents who were poisoned to death. In addition, one of the soldiers, that opens up and relates events of his childhood, confesses that he poisoned his father following the wishes of his mother’s ghost.

It is interesting how Buñuel shows the high levels of awkwardness and oddity when the bourgeois are invaded by human instincts which do not make concessions across social classes. In this case, he uses sexual impulses to show how incongruous this social class is. They look extremely awkward when trying to have sex: they cannot take off their clothes and do not really know what to do with the animal instincts that were invading their bodies. Such instincts were considered so extraneous to their social class that, in order to fulfill them, they go through the trouble of sneaking out of their own house to have sex in the garden so their guests would not notice what they were doing.

Another interesting point made about the dominant role and differences of social classes is conveyed by the use of sound. Traffic noise mists up important conversations regarding economics and politics. This is a sharp criticism to the social system because it implies that this kind of topics, which affect every strata of society, can only be heard and discussed by the affluent. The rest of the population is kept in the darkness of confusing noises so that they won’t learn about the actions these people engage in, such as transporting and selling cocaine.