Sightlines · reception

How The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was received

1972 · Luis Buñuel · The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie on Sightlines

The arc

No rediscovery needed — it was a hit on arrival, winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and proving Buñuel, then in his seventies, was still cinema's sharpest prankster. Fifty years on it's settled comfortably into the canon as the standard entry point to late Buñuel.

What’s debated

The perennial cinephile debate is whether this or The Exterminating Angel — its mirror image, where the dinner guests can't leave instead of never getting to eat — is the superior Buñuel dinner party.

Its footprint

The image of the six impeccably dressed bourgeois walking down an empty country road to nowhere is one of art cinema's most referenced visuals, and 'the dinner that keeps getting interrupted' has become shorthand for a whole genre of eat-the-rich satire.

Where it stands

Firmly canon — a fixture of greatest-films lists and the Buñuel most likely to appear in a Letterboxd top four as a signal of good taste with a sense of humor.

Did you know? When the film won the Oscar, Buñuel — a lifelong mischief-maker — joked to the press that he'd already paid $25,000 for it, quipping that Americans have their weaknesses but always pay their debts; the deadpan caused a minor scandal.

A Deleuzian reading of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie →