MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Ein andalusischer Hund [de])

France 1929
d: Luis Buñuel
Bfi Video Publishing (Region 2 uk)

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Prelude: a young woman sits compliantly as Buñuel takes a razor and slices her eye open. What follows is a documentary rendering of the dream state, of dream logic; and/or a surrealist exposition involving, for example, a swarm of ants, underarm hair, a striped box, all addressing each other opaquely; and/or a Freudian sexual smorgasbord, with everything symbolising something else; and/or a contrivance by two ambitious young Spaniards to offer as much outrageousness as an artistic alibi can cover. And so on. Originally a silent, but three soundtrack versions are around, one containing the original (disc) accompaniment of Tristan and Isolde plus a tango, the others with specially composed scores by, respectively, Mauricio Kagel and Martin Matalon.
— BBa, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"'The light cloud passes now in front of the moon. The razor blade moves across the young woman's eye, cutting it open' - this antimontage begins the result of an uneasy collaboration between Salvador Dali, with his penchant for scandalous self-advertising, and Luis Buñuel, with his scandalizing sense of revolt. Following the film's first showings, Buñuel, for one, was exasperated by 'the imbecile crowd [that] found beautiful or poetic something that was basically a desperate, passionate call to murder.' Nevertheless, Un Chien Andalou remains the first deliberately unattractive film, indigestible despite much chewing over by critics looking for 'dream symbolism.' Jean Vigo writes that 'in this film we will have to view with something more than the everyday eye.'"
— James Brook, PFA
•••••
As with all of Buñuel's films, Un Chien Andalou illustrates Buñuel's obsessions and is replete with references to his upbringing. Recurrent reference points are surrealism and religion, as already mentioned, seasoned with violence and a willingness to shock. Images from Spain appear regularly throughout his work as do images of the poor and suffering. It was Buñuel's only silent film and perhaps for this reason appears more dynamic than his other works. Along with L'Age d'Or and Las Hurdes (1933), the film is very explicit and confrontational. These three films are exercises in style and form. It is here that Buñuel learnt his craft, but thereafter, as Freddy Buache has said, Buñuel could still shock but "He preferred to bury his explosives blandly beneath the surface of an apparently traditional style." (13) However, this could be misconstrued. Rene Clair's surrealist Entr'acte (1924), made four years before Un Chien Andalou, has a greater appreciation of, and daring use of style. It does make Buñuel's film look traditional by comparison. Yet, for a film made as a companion piece to a Dadaist ballet, it lacks Un Chien Andalou's grace and fluidity. Clair may be the greater stylist, but Buñuel is the greater filmmaker.
— Michael Koller, Senses of Cinema

L'Âge d'or

(Das goldene Zeitalter [de])

France 1930
d: Luis Buñuel
Bfi Video Publishing (Region 2 uk)

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'Our sexual desire has to be seen as the product of centuries of repressive and emasculating Catholicism... it is always coloured by the sweet secret sense of sin,' mused Buñuel in his autobiography 'My Last Breath'. One might describe "L'âge d'or" as 63 minutes of coitus interruptus, a scabrous essay on Eros and civilisation, wherein a couple is constantly prised apart from furious love-making by the police, high society and, above all, the Church. Financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, a dream patron who loyally pronounced the film exquisite and delicious, even as right-wing extremists were pelting it with ink and stink bombs, this is a jagged memento of that Golden Age before directors forgot the art of filming erotica (the celebrated toe-sucking is sexier by far than almost anything since), the revolutionary avant-garde lost its sense of humour, and surrealism itself fell prey to advertising-agency chic.
— SJo, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
L'Age D'Or is a legendary and a living classic, whose humor and eroticism remain undated. "In Paris in the late twenties, Bunuel mixed eagerly with the Surrealists, and both Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or are surrealist films. L'Age D'Or, which until this year was banned for public showing, is distinctly Freudian, suggesting Bunuel's violent reaction to the sexual perversions he had encountered at his Jesuit school. The swelling chords of Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' on the soundtrack add to the erotic atmosphere; the lovers fight continually against everyone else in this symbolic world. Freedom, Bunuel appears to emphasize, exists only in sexual indulgence or, more precisely, in complete unselfconsciousness. The film is rich in cinematic innovations - the interior monologue, the use of mirrors and so on - but it is still deliberately obscure in parts.... 'Surrealism taught me that life has a moral meaning that man cannot ignore,' he has said. 'Through Surrealism I discovered for the first time that man is not free.'"
— Peter Cowie, "Seventy Years Of Cinema," 1969
•••••
"'Modot continues to walk along the street, giving not a thought for anything except the woman he desires, and completely indifferent to the old man who kicks a violin along the pavement toward him, then stamps on it' (Freddy Buache). "Long praised by surrealists for its intransigent promotion of the interests of eroticism above all others, L'Age D'Or continues to attract those intelligent enough to have a 'bad attitude' regarding the family, private property, and the state. In the 1930 manifesto defending L'Age D'Or, the poet Paul Eluard declared that 'Buñuel has formulated a theory of revolution and love that goes to the very core of human nature....' Ado Kyrou adds: 'L'Age D'Or doesn't tickle. Its claws are poisoned.'"
— James Brook, PFA
•••••
Buñuel continually manipulates time, space and mise en scène to pervert the logic of narrative continuity (6). His structuring device is the faux raccord, mismatches that produce oneiric, transformed images of reality. However, Hollywood is not far away. In a homage to U.S. silent comedy, a toy giraffe comes flying out of a window, Modot kicks a small dog, who, incidentally, must have survived this trauma, as he remained a family pet at the Buñuels' house. His name, by the way, was 'Dalou'.
L'Âge d'or has shocked, repelled and scandalised cinema-goers for seventy years now. This kind of relentless assault on the repressive social strategies of the bourgeoisie can be seen more recently in films like Dogme 1 - Festen/The Celebration (1998). As we glimpse the beauty of a sky reflected, the film catapults us into the present day. Looking around, such impulses still seem cogent. While l'amour fou does not conquer all in L'age d'or, it is the possibility of this love forever deferred that continues to surface as resistance. Even now.
— Sophy Williams, 2000, Senses of Cinema

Las Hurdes

(Land ohne Brot [de])

Spain 1933
d: Luis Buñuel
Films sans Frontières (Region 0 fr)

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Buñuel's first film after his Surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dali is a mock-documentary on the wretchedness of life in a remote region of Spain-mock, not in the sense that its content is not real (it is all too real, and that is the point), but in that it mocks both the documentary and its viewer, mercilessly. A deadpan voice-over narration, composed by the poet Pierre Unik, adopts the tone of a typical travelog; prospective tourists are offered glimpses of disease-ridden individuals, dying children, the mentally retarded, bees attacking a dying animal...in short, a reality that surpasses the most ingenious of Surrealism's nightmares. In its images and obsessions, the film harks back to "L'Âge d'or" and looks forward to "Los Olvidados" and beyond. "The text as a whole is an example of the Surrealist doctrine of the transfiguring power of language. Here it blinds us to the evident manipulations of the montage, which Buñuel implies are identical with those of fiction films, and it consoles us with variations on how the helpless film crew could do nothing for the suffering subjects of the film."
— P. Adams Sitney: International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers Vol.1
•••••
"Do you see this wonderful valley?" director Luis Buñuel asked his crew as they began filming this documentary; "well, this is where Hell begins." Buñuel had long displayed a love/hate relationship with his native Spain, and his bitterness rarely flowed with greater force than in "Las Hurdes". While the Spanish valley of Las Hurdes Bajas is green and beautiful, the mountainous region of Las Hurdes Altas is mired in economic and cultural poverty. As captured on film by Buñuel, Las Hurdes Altas is a land of flinty soil where few if any crops will grow. Bread is a rare luxury that must be brought in from the valley. Many of the residents subsist on pork, and most suffer from dietary deficiencies. The village's only salable export is a bitter variety of honey, and the Catholic Church has all but abandoned the region; the single teacher at the village's tiny schoolhouse is the town's sole contact with the outside world. Intermarriage among the families in the village has left many of the children retarded or handicapped, and the children who are born healthy often succumb to starvation and common illnesses. And "Las Hurdes" is a place with no art, culture or music; intellectually, the village is as barren as its soil. While it was Buñuel's sole documentary, "Las Hurdes" is thematically consistent with his other films; its fascination with insects, unblinking look at human cruelty, subtle but clear disgust with the Catholic Church, and moments of jet-black humor mark it as the work of Spain's greatest surrealist filmmaker. "Las Hurdes" was also embraced as an attack on Franco's regime; a British leftist group screened it in the United Kingdom as "The film that answers Franco."
— Mark Deming, AMG

Los Olvidados

(Die Vergessenen [de])

Mexico 1950
d: Luis Buñuel
Films sans Frontières (Region 0 fr)

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Buñuel's return to the public eye after nearly 20 years in the critical wilderness came with this superbly caustic account of poverty, delinquency and crime in the slums of Mexico City. Basically he took a then popular genre, a major force in both Hollywood and Italian neo-realism - the liberal social conscience picture - and transformed it into a brilliantly acidic vision of human desires, fears and foibles. The story concerns the tragedies that befall a couple of members of a violent gang of kids who go round mugging, robbing and generally inflicting cruelty on everyone around them. But Buñuel, unlike his peers, is not content to lay all the blame for their acts and predicament on an abstract society: individuals also have inner motivations. Thus there is a poetic and precise emphasis on dreams and sexuality, and characters are far from being stereotypes: a blind man, frequently tormented by the kids, can hardly arouse our pity when Buñuel also shows him to be a hypocrite and a paedophile. A wonderfully lucid film that refuses to allow us to indulge in blinkered sentimentality or narrow ideology.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"You plant the camera in front of a beautiful landscape with magnificent clouds and marvelous flowers, and when you're ready to shoot, [Buñuel] turns the camera 180 degrees and films a dirty street with dogs and people throwing rocks at each other!"-Gabriel Figueroa
With love but without pity, Buñuel unfolds the story of a gang of slum kids who become delinquents as a defense against poverty, lack of affection, and the cruelty of police and pederasts on the city streets. In the characters of Jaibo, the gang leader, and Pedro, his naive victim, Buñuel makes a subtle distinction between corruption and delinquency. But as fellow Surrealist and Buñuel biographer Ado Kyrou pointed out, "there is no moralizing, as in American films of the same type; rather, the film testifies to the great distress of our times." A gang of youths tipping a legless beggar out of his cart; a chicken staring down a beaten blind man; Pedro's dream in which his mother offers him a side of beef with a saintly smile: such images evidence a passionate surrealism. Buñuel: "There is nothing imagined in this film; it is all merely true."
— PFA
•••••
In Los Olvidados, sexuality consistently gives way to violence as a driving force of society. The closing sequence proceeds with the inexorable logic of the preordained. Pedro, unable to return to the farm, seeks a hiding place, but ultimately finds none. The poor of his neighborhood, equally downtrodden, cannot see beyond the length of their own miseries toward those of others, and treat Pedro with the same hostility and malice the better-off have already demonstrated. Poverty, it seems, is no guarantee of humanity in Buñuel's world. Pedro is ultimately tracked down by Jaibo, and killed. Soon after, the same fate greets Jaibo. In the film's final, Buñuelian, irony, Pedro's mother roams the streets, calling out his name, not noticing the passing cart ushering his body to the final resting place of a nearby ditch.
Los Olvidados marks a unique moment in Buñuel's work. Following this film, the focus of his work shifted toward the lives of the bourgeois, and his coolly jaundiced eye roamed the estates and mansions of the frivolously wealthy. Buñuel developed an ironic, detached viewpoint, from which he could safely watch these outrages. Buñuel's anger at the world's horrors never dissipated; it simply moved below the surface. But Los Olvidados is the one Buñuel film where he unabashedly gives a hoot, and its bitter power is unforgettable.
— Saul Austerlitz, February 2003, Senses of Cinema

Subida al cielo

(Der Weg, der zum Himmel führt [de])

Mexico 1952
d: Luis Buñuel
WDR TV (Region 0 de)

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Él

(Er [de])

Mexico 1953
d: Luis Buñuel
Films sans Frontières (Region 0 fr)

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Why would a fanatically jealous husband creep up on his sleeping wife clutching a bottle of anaesthetic and a needle and thread? In the gospel according to Buñuel, it's because he's a typical bourgeois male, terrified of female sexuality, projecting his own heavily repressed lusts on to every other male in sight. Buñuel examines him dispassionately, as a victim of himself and of the society that formed him; his story is neither a tragedy nor a comedy, but a necessary working out of certain moral and psychological tensions that are intrinsic in his class. The tone couldn't be further from the self-congratulation of an exercise like "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie".
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
This is a study of "mad love" gone truly mad amidst the neurotic compulsions of the haute bourgeoisie. The protagonist, Francisco, is a forty-year-old virgin holding out for perfect-and perfectly respectable-love. Francisco's apparent self-possession masks a ruthless severity, and his painful romanticism girdles insane misogyny. He takes a young wife who tries to adjust to the tyranny of his jealous behavior, until the evening he enters her room with some menacing instruments: a rope, needle and thread, scissors, cotton wool, and antiseptic. "The influence of de Sade is everywhere apparent in a scenario that the majority of the Mexican public took for a run-of-the-mill melodrama on jealousy" (Ado Kyrou).
"El" inaugurates the third line of Buñuel's Mexican career, which follows the complicated, tormented loves of those neurotics who best crystallize the confusions of the haute bourgeoisie" Raymond Durgnat. The film's dubious hero is a wealthy man whose apparent self-possession masks a ruthless severity, and whose painful romanticism girdles insane misogyny. "The hero of El interests me as a beetle, or a disease-carrying fly does," Buñuel has written. "I've always found insects exciting. In El I was consciously trying to make a film about extreme, non-conventional types of Love and Jealousy.... [D]espite what the critics inferred, there was no precise intention of imitating the Marquis de Sade.... The most natural thing for me, when working in a dramatic form, is to see and think out a situation from a Sadique or sadist point of view. I found myself asking: what should the character take--a revolver? a knife? a chair? I finished by choosing some more disturbing objects. That's all."
— PFA
•••••
Adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel (whose characterization of the male protagonist was inspired by the author's own troubled first marriage) by writer and progressive activist Mercedes Pinto (who, like Buñuel was a Spanish exile who had immigrated to Latin America), Él is an elegantly understated, wickedly incisive, and wry satire on obsession, superficiality, hollow spirituality, possessiveness, and machismo. Incorporating expressionistic devices of reflecting character interiority through architecture and mise-en-scène, Buñuel uses integrally tactile and voluptuous Gaudi-like structures and ornate, baroque ornamentation in Don Francisco's secluded (and self-imprisoning) estate that paradoxically reveal the suppressed eroticism, passion, and perversion that lay beneath the façade of genteel and pious respectability. (Note Buñuel's indelible long shot of the baroque church interior and the claustrophobic bell tower sequence that would subsequently inspire Alfred Hitchcock's stylistically reverent compositions in Vertigo, a similarly themed film on obsession, possession, and madness). Furthermore, the organically formed interiors and change in character point-of view also create an inherent sense of asymmetry that, in turn, contributes to a pervasive imbalance in the progression and tone of the narrative. In a seemingly trivial, yet sinister parallel image, Don Francisco's tormented, zigzagging staircase ascent is mirrored in the resigned, parting image of the hermetic aristocrat as he walks away from the camera towards a dark tunnel. It is a wry, foreboding double entendred image of calculated, deliberately tempered passion and suppressed mania concealed within the socially accepted institution of self-abnegation and devoted fervor - a dystopic vision of spiritual sanctuary - a wolf in the midst of sheep.
— Acquarello

Ensayo de un crimen

(aka: La Vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz • Das verbrecherische Leben des Archibaldo de la Cruz [de] )

Mexico 1955
d: Luis Buñuel
Films sans Frontières (Region 0 fr)

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Buñuel marshals all of his characteristic amoral wit in this tale of a would-be murderer frustrated at every turn in his efforts to get his kicks from a successful sex killing. As usual, the master eschews the visual fussiness of 'style', opting for the straightforward camera set-up at all times. The use of props like the toy music box from his childhood which triggers off Archibaldo's lust, and the wax dummy burned after one of his attempts is thwarted, is all the more stunning (and hilarious) as a result.
— RM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
When he was a child, Archibaldo believed he had killed his governess with the magic powers of a music box. As an adult, the mild-mannered Archibaldo still believes he can literally slay the women--in fact, he confesses to several murders. Critic Raymond Durgnat compares Archibaldo to Francisco in El: "Like Francisco, Archibaldo adores purity and execrates female appetites (incarnated by the splendidly vulgar Patrizia). Like Francisco, he believes himself spiritually superior to the rabble. But where Francisco takes morality seriously, Archibaldo consciously entertains his egoistic disdain of morality.... Instead of projecting his rapacity onto others, he assumes it in himself. Where Francisco is devout, Archibaldo is an artist.... His crimes are...his very conscious, aesthetic attempts to revive a delicious sensation...."
— PFA
•••••
"Although each of his films contains its share of surrealistic humor, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is one of Buñuel's few films which could properly be described as a comedy...much of [which] revolves around the repeated frustration of [Archibaldo's] lethal intentions.... [A]n exaggerated happy ending...only makes Buñuel's pessimism the more obvious...."
— Chicago Art Institute.
•••••
"...One can perceive better than in any of his other films how [Buñuel] manages to inject madness into realism, and how a piece of frothy entertainment can be shot through and through with black humor. He does not indulge in any cunning aesthetic devices or spectacular dream sequences, but pads unobtrusively up to his subject in order to be able to sink his teeth into it more devastatingly."
— Freddy Buache
•••••
Luis Buñuel creates a macabre and insightful comedy on obsession, machismo, and bourgeois hypocrisy in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. Using the repeated imagery of mirrors and reflections, Buñuel provides a figurative window into his own sardonic humor and personal idiosyncrasies: a foot fetish suggested through the death of the governess (that is subsequently manifested in Diary of a Chambermaid and Tristana); a sense of voyeurism that arises from vigilant observation, revealed through Archibaldo's discovery of a lovers' quarrel (shown through an angled mirror) and Carlota's (Ariadna Welter) rendezvous with her lover; an obsession to capture the essence of the perfect woman through Lavinia (Miroslava Stern) and her mannequin likeness (the doppelganger imagery is also examined in his final film, That Obscure Object of Desire). In a playful homage to the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, Buñuel further illustrates his droll and incisive wit by creating a surreal twist to pivotal Hitchcockian images involving a glass of milk (Notorious) and a straight razor (Spellbound). Through Archibaldo's bizarre and unorthodox dual life as a serial killer, Buñuel subverts the conventional devices of a suspense film and creates an irreverent and audacious personal statement on the conundrum of sexual politics.
— Acquarello

Viridiana

(Viridiana [de])

Spain / Mexico 1961
d: Luis Buñuel
Films sans Frontières (Region 2 fr)

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After years in Mexican exile, Buñuel returned to his native Spain to make this dark account of corruption, which was immediately banned. A young nun, full of charity, kindness, and idealistic illusions about humanity, visits her uncle and tries to help some local peasants and beggars. But her altruism is greeted with ridicule and cruelty. Pinal gives a superb performance in the title role, and Buñuel's clear-eyed wit is relentless in its depiction of human selfishness, ingratitude, and cynicism. The final beggars' orgy - a black parody of the Last Supper, performed to the ethereal strains of Händel's 'Messiah' - is one of the director's most memorably disturbing, funny, and brutal scenes. A masterpiece.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"In 1960, Mexican resident Luis Bu?uel returned to Spain to shoot a film after 25 years of voluntary exile. Bu?uel obediently submitted his scenario to the censors, and altered details according to their suggestions. He even changed the ending of the film to satisfy them. ('It is a magnificent ending,' said the surrealist later. 'Much better than the original crude one.') Bu?uel showed an unfinished print to the censors, received their approval, and left for Paris to do the sound mix and final cut. The competed Viridiana was shown on the last night of the Cannes Film Festival - May 17, 1961 - and was awarded the prestigious Palme D'Or. The director remained in Paris, while the official Spanish film industry representative, a Sr. Munoz-Fontan, accepted the award. Viridiana touched off a livid scandal involving a condemnation from the Vatican, a total ban in Spain, punishment of bamboozled bureaucrats including the unfortunate Sr. Munoz-Fontan, legal entanglements about the nationality of the film (finally Mexican), seizings in Italy, secret screenings in Paris, and then a profitable world-wide commercial release accompanied by extensive critical appreciation. Bu?uel told an interviewer: 'I was not trying to be blasphemous, but then Pope John knows more about blasphemy than I. It was chance that led me to project the impious. If I had any pious ideas, perhaps I would express them too.... I refuse to mix in the scandal. Viridiana follows a tradition, a line that has been mine ever since L'Age D'Or; they are 30 yeas apart, and I can say that these are the two films which I directed with the greatest freedom. It's been my experience to succeed sometimes more and sometimes less with my films, and also to make routine films in order to make a living. However, I have always refused to make concessions.' Overall, although it suffered a few detractors, Viridiana was immediately acclaimed as a modern treasure. Variety called it 'a perfect whole.... Brilliantly carpentered offbeat pic is sure to be controversial.' Andrew Sarris called it 'one of the imperishable landmarks of the personal cinema.' Critic Freddy Buache summarizes the main theme of Viridiana: 'Good and evil are fallacies that lead to dead ends. All acts are tinged to an equal degree with ambiguity, and nothing will change so long as we still live with our present moral system, i.e. the denial of l'amour fou and the affirmation of mystifying abstract forces.'"
— Bill Lopez, PFA
•••••
One wonders just what Francisco Franco and the leaders of his regime were thinking when they invited arch surrealist and stubborn anti-Fascist Luis Buñuel back to the land of his birth to make "Viridiana". Buñuel had made a career out of confronting his audiences and defying creative authority, and anyone who imagined that he had meekly begun sleeping with the enemy was in for a shock. "Viridiana" was a gleefully blasphemous tirade against Catholicism and the Spanish bourgeoisie that proved something of an embarrassment to Spain despite winning top honors at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Fernando Rey, one of Buñuel's favorite actors in his late period, is deliciously sleazy yet refined as Don Jaime; Rey's easy charm and understated wit are the perfect match for the elegantly corrupt man whose sense of propriety does not rule out drugging and seducing his niece, who happens to be a nun. Silvia Pinal's performance as "Viridiana" often suggests that she isn't entirely in on the joke, but the distance works in her favor, as the young novitiate seems blissfully unaware first of her uncle's designs upon her, and later of the contempt that the beggars and street people she tries to help feel for her. The final scene - in which the beggars freeze into a recreation of The Last Supper as a filthy woman "photographs" them by lifting her skirts - is, along with "Simon of the Desert", one of Buñuel's strongest and funniest anti-clerical moments. Like the best of Buñuel's work, "Viridiana" is smart, witty, deeply cutting, and thoroughly uncompromised, a fitting bit of revenge from an old Loyalist against the dictator who defeated him. Buñuel would have the last laugh yet again when he returned to Spain nine years later to make "Tristana", a fitting companion piece to "Viridiana".
— Mark Deming, AMG

Belle de Jour

(Belle de jour [de])

France / Italy 1967
d: Luis Buñuel
Süddeutsche Zeitung (Region 0 de)

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Buñuel's cool, elegant version of Joseph Kessel's novel is an amoral comedy of manners. Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise Séverine, married to a surgeon, decides to while away her afternoons by working in a high-class whorehouse, where she encounters a variety of characters - a Chinaman with a strangely erotic box, a depraved Duke, and a gangster with gold teeth, with whom she falls in love. Or does she? Allowing us no indication of what is real, what is not, Buñuel constructs both a clear portrait of the bourgeoisie as degenerate, dishonest and directionless, and an unhysterical depiction of Deneuve's inner fantasy life, where she entertains dreams of humiliation galore. For a film about such a potentially sensationalist subject, it's remarkably discreet and chaste.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Nothing else in BELLE DE JOUR quite lives up to the exquisite jolt of that first shift from fantasy to reality, or vice versa. Throughout, Bunuel juggles scenes that may be "real" with others that seem like dreams or wish-fulfilments. But, by the end, the technique seems more like a means of toying with the audience than a genuine correlative for the protagonist's conflicted state of mind. The result is almost, but not quite, a great movie--as opaque as its central character, it teases and intrigues, but falls short of delivering emotional satisfaction. Essential viewing, though, if only for Deneuve's signature performance; Pierre Clementi also shines in the role of a brutal young hood who develops an obsession with "Belle."
— Michael Scheinfeld, TV MovieGuide
•••••
In Belle de Jour Catharine Deneuve's beauty is a thing in itself: Deneuve was a collaborator in Buñuel's vision and gives a knowing performance as Séverine, a bored-cold bourgeoise who discovers how good evil can be on afternoons spent in a high-class brothel, where fantasy itself is a fetish object. The film is as endlessly mysterious and fascinating as the Chinese lacquer box into which Séverine peers-and what does she see? Don't quit your day job, Séverine. It takes violence, the more fantasized the better, to make any sort of crack in the lacquer. Belle de Jour is L'Age d'Or updated and in color. As Raymond Durgnat wrote, "Glittery, cool and urbane, Buñuel's film looks just like Lubitsch à la mode-almost a design for living in the Playgirl era. But underneath it's a bleak and sharp surrealist object that one can't touch, or even think about afterwards, without bleeding."
— PFA

La Voie lactée

(Die Milchstraße [de])

France / Italy 1969
d: Luis Buñuel
Arte TV (Region 0 de)

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Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie

(Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie [de] • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [en])

France / Italy / Spain 1972
d: Luis Buñuel
Criterion (Region 1 us)

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Delightful if overrated comedy from Buñuel, flitting about from frustrating situation to frustrating situation as six characters in search of a meal never manage actually to eat it. Are they prevented by their own fantasies? by their lack of purpose? by their discreet charm? Buñuel never really lets us know, while managing to skip through some very funny scenes en route. But it does lack the savage bite and genuinely nightmarish feel of his earlier work (comparison with "The Exterminating Angel" shows up the later film's complacency), while the chic stylishness of the characters comes over as overbearing rather than satirically revealing.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
“Freedom is conceivable only after a certain number of calories.”-Caroline Benjo. Buñuel and Carrière's account of the nightlong (lifelong, class-wide) attempts of six wealthy people to sit down to dinner is the comedy of manners to end all comedies of manners. With la crème de la crème of European actors, Buñuel produces, in lieu of something edible, the secret ingredient of the bourgeois power base, which might be the desire for thwarted desire. Cuisine interruptus. As Raymond Durgnat wrote, “Their plague is not the Exterminating Angel but the Interrupting One.” It's never the right time for sex or food-a theme that goes back to L'age d'or-but the rituals of sangfroid continue in the face of a pot-smoking militia and terrorists at the door, the elusive leg-of-lamb and the rubber chicken, waking nightmares and walking dreams. If reality is a promise, so is consumption, and one can live on air.
— Judy Bloch, PFA
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"Le charme discret" est un film drôle, cela va sans dire. Mais sa nonchalance ne peut masquer sa férocité. Si la dernière œuvre de Buñuel compte désormais parmi ses plus grandes réussites, c'est bien parce que son metteur en scène, non content de moquer ou de dénoncer telle ou telle classe sociale, telle ou telle conduite ignoble ou grotesque, a encore la force de changer de style - marque d'un créateur en pleine possession de ses moyens. Délaissant aussi bien le surréalisme désormais "classique" de "L'âge d'or" que les récits plus linéaires et parfois directement fantastiques, il a su imposer une forme éclatée qui, par la force déroutante de ses allusions, références et impropriétés, conteste à son tour la bourgeoisie sur l'un des plans qui lui tiennent le plus à cœur : le plan formel où elle a coutume de se représenter et de se reconnaître.
— Frédéric Vitoux, Positif
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Luis Buñuel creates an absurdly comic and wickedly incisive portrait of the meaningless social rituals and polite hypocrisy of the upper middle class in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. By interweaving exaggerated reality with lucid dream sequences, Buñuel blurs the distinction between civilized behavior and social indictment. As in The Exterminating Angel, the inability of the guests to enjoy a defining ritual associated with their class results, paradoxically, from an unwillingness to break from social tradition. In essence, the dinner party provides the means for validating social worth, and therefore, becomes an indispensable, self-perpetuating event for the guests. But inevitably, like the repeated image of the weary guests walking on a deserted street, it is an endless and incomprehensible path that ultimately leads nowhere.
— Acquarello
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Sight connects. Buñuel has filmed the story of the first capitalist hero, Robinson Crusoe, and Crusoe is saved from loneliness by his slave, but the price he must pay is fraternity, seeing Friday as a human being. He has also filmed the story of Robinson’s descendants in The Discreet Charm, and these greedy, deceptive people can only flee their overpopulated, polluted, promiscuous island into the comic loneliness of their dreams. Sight and survival, desires and dreams, seeing others in order to see oneself. This parabola of sight is essential to Buñuel’s art. Nazarin will not see God unless he sees his fellow men; Viridiana will not see herself unless she sees outside herself and accepts the world. The characters in The Discreet Charm can never see themselves or others. They may be funny, but they are already in hell. Elegant humor only cloaks despair.
— From “The Discreet Charm of Luis Buñuel” by Carlos Fuentes