Lap Dogs
Brudnoy, David
Movie Review: Lap Dogs There are films like The Ruling Class, so bitingly pungent, so wittily acid in good moments, that one almost forgives, but not forgets, the pervasive obstinacy of theme: in...
...permeated by his thoughts it is satiny smooth and substantial, wrong-minded because incomplete and loaded, but a splendid movie as movie...
...Then there are films like Luis Bunuel's 29th and latest, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, infused with the same message, but here slid into the viewer's consciousness off-handedly, casually, practically politely, and - Bunuel's generous touch of genius - with bull's-eye effectiveness...
...On a technical level, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is, quite simply, perfect...
...We see no starving masses...
...Flash: it is The-venot's dream, or is it Senechal's...
...From the prompter's well come their lines, which two of the men try to say, as the others slink dogantly off the stage and the audience erupts into catcalls...
...There lies Bunuel's intent, his long-time, again and again repeated intent: the evisceration of that class and that locale along the political spectrum which he detests...
...Stripped of the message it is elegantly whipped froth...
...but seen as well without previous familiarity either with Bunuel or Marienbad, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a treat available to anyone willing to invest a little effort in the process of viewing...
...Thevenot's wife (Del-phine Seyrig) loves pants-suits and the idea of an affair with the ambassador, and her younger sister (Bulle Ogier) would love to love dry martinis but can't keep them down...
...Keeping in mind the technique of Marienbad and the pervasiveness of Bunuel's object of derision, as portrayed most effectively in Exterminating Angel (and also in various other Bunuel films, like Belle de Jour, 1966), makes for a heightened appreciation of the film under discussion here...
...Five Parisians and their friend, ambassador of a squalid banana republic called Miranda, engage in a series of unconsummated attempts at eating together, one successful and one frustrated go at having sex, and a few ambles along a country road...
...The men are also engaged in drug traffic, the ambassador (Fernando Rey, who was into the same bag in The French Connection) bringing heroin into France in his diplomatic pouch, his friends Thevenot (Paul Frankeur) and Senechal (Jean-Pierre Cassel) taking it off his hands for distribution, no doubt, to the oppressed masses...
...We take The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie on its own terms, as Luis Bunuel's possibly final statement (he's 72) of a particular world view...
...Next scene...
...each scene takes just enough minutes, no more, no less...
...how grotesque their misplaced priorities, under the glittery perfect smiles...
...Bunuel's timing is a marvel...
...films are well-done, or badly done...
...An example: the six are invited by the colonel (Claude Pieplu) to his home for dinner...
...David Brudnoyavid Brudnoy...
...He's stacked nearly all the cards against himself, and still wins...
...Others may recall Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which guests at a dinner party were prevented by their own fantastic volitions from leaving, ever, and in which Bunuel's hostility to the dominant class was expressed much more bitterly than in Discreet Charm...
...these lovely, over-refined predators...
...The story, to repeat, is slight...
...our rich six do not brutalize their servants (though The-venot calls in the ambassador's driver, offers him a martini, watches the servant gulp it down, tells him he may go, and then makes his point: the lower classes are obviously unimprovable, witness the way the fellow misuses a martini...
...unimaginable (or imagined but unlikely) reveals the orchestrations of a cinema master...
...Never mind...
...It is a notion deserving cinema treatment, as does one that Bunuel will not assay: the masses as lumpish and gross, philistinely ignorant...
...Time's Jay Cocks nicely interpreted the repeated scene along the country road as a linking device weaving together what he calls a "miniature Decameron...
...these despoilers of mankind, how attractively they dine, how sensible their appreciation of wines and (this reviewer's own public vice) very dry martinis, well-stirred...
...In short, Bunuel stands miles above the usual propaganda artist, contrasting his enemies not with his chosen people, the unseen masses, but with his enemies' own pretensions...
...each flip from the plausible to the obviously (or is it...
...I can do no better in describing that vignette...
...Were Bunuel's treatment in this film not so entirely successful, and his now somewhat modulated political thing not so familiar, one might be tempted to rail against his manifest bias...
...the terrorista is a gorgeous clod, better suited for the bordello than the barrio...
...Senechal (Stephane Audran) cares about giving elegant dinners and making it with Senechal...
...They're next at the real party...
...Filling in the gaps: a bishop who works as the Senechals' gardener, a colonel who insults and is shot by the ambassador, a comely young terrorista who tries to kill but is instead fondled and disarmed (and in the end betrayed) by the ambassador, and other moments light and dark, fabulous and mundane, real or dreamed...
...The women, one supposes, know nothing or at least care nothing about heroin or the men's involvement with it...
...But the colonel and guests oppress the ambassador, who then pulls a pistol and....And whose dream is that...
...With regard to politicized films, we might paraphrase Wilde: there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral film...
...The "story" is slight, nearly formless...
...Uncompleted dinner and lunch parties follow each other relentlessly, interrupted by a night in jail, a confrontation with a ghost, a young soldier imposing himself upon the ladies in a tea room to tell his sad story of childhood woe, a murder or two, rides in luxurious autos to and from excursions to eat or make love...
...The Ruling Class attempts something similar, but its makers couldn't resist the temptation to show at least some of the actual effects (or perceived effects) of irresponsible wealth on those less favored...
...Yes, the rich are different, they do have more money, and, Bunuel insists, their pastimes are infinitely more dangerous...
...Lively guests...
...Movie Review: Lap Dogs There are films like The Ruling Class, so bitingly pungent, so wittily acid in good moments, that one almost forgives, but not forgets, the pervasive obstinacy of theme: in that current Peter O'Toole movie, the wickedness of the upper crust, hammered home to last and last...
...Bunuel slides actuality into and out of fantasy with the sureness of Spitz breast-stroking...
...He evidently cannot make an error: you will search in vain for a recent movie so true to life in color, set, detail, yet so cleverly ambiguous in delineating the actual and the imagined...
...If the Spanish exile's loathing of the ruling classes has tempered somewhat in recent years, it has been augmented by a maturer disdain: these spoiled sickly infantile reptiles, he is saying...
...But The Discreet Charm retains its reserve to the end, to yet another shot of the six friends walking briskly along that country road...
...They pull up in their limousines, are ushered into an elegant but faded dining room, there served chicken by a waiter who drops the birds - they bounce - picks them up, plops them on plates - they bounce again - at which point the curtain opens and our friends find themselves on a stage, characters playing before a packed house...
...It is an ever so much more potent way to drive home a lesson, and should serve as a model for the genre...
...Some viewers will remember Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and will remark the familiar touches of discontinuity and mystery, while noting the unobtrusiveness of these tricky devices in Bunuel's Discreet Charm as compared to the near-impossibility of comprehension wrought by Resnais' distracting use of them...
...Bunuel's haut bourgeoisie are in his eyes the scum of the earth, albeit so polite, so gay, so charming...
...The colonel's wife is garrulous and in her way gracious...
...Bunuel here presents not the physically golden Beautiful People beloved by Antonioni, but, rather, two corpulent and one rather slimy gentlemen and three attractive but by no means wholly delightsome ladies, decked out in their nicely tailored clothes, setting about their business: eating and drinking...
...The message is reed-thin, though insistent: these people are inane, they are cooly vicious, they are pampered and reactionary and ultimately politically Right, that is, wrong...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
