Sightlines · a viewing thread

Buñuel and the Bourgeoisie

A run of surrealist provocations where every dinner, prayer, and marriage bed hides an appetite polite society can't admit — watch them together for the way Buñuel (and Pasolini's Theorem) keep pulling the tablecloth out from under the well-heeled.

Film-school canon that leans cult over crowd — dry, blasphemous, sexually frank comedy of manners; easy to love if you like your satire strange, and genuinely demanding when Pasolini turns it devastating.

• L'Âge d'or (1930)
• Viridiana (1962)
• Belle de Jour (1967)
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
• Theorem (1968)
• The Exterminating Angel (1962) — The dinner-party companion piece to The Discreet Charm — guests who inexplicably cannot leave the drawing room; if that one landed, this is the Buñuel to finally pull down.
• That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) — Buñuel's last film and the coldest echo of Belle de Jour — an aging bourgeois undone by a desire he can never quite grasp (two actresses play the one woman).
• The Phantom of Liberty (1974) — The plotless, free-associating late Buñuel that drifts from dinner table to convent to firing squad — the surrealist cousin to Discreet Charm you never finished.
• Simon of the Desert (1965) — The blasphemous 45-minute gem where a pillar saint is tempted by the Devil — Viridiana's religious provocation distilled to its sharpest, driest point.
• Él (1953) — The overlooked Mexican-period Buñuel where a wealthy, devout pillar of society curdles into paranoid jealousy — respectability as a mask for pathology, exactly this thread's obsession.
• Nazarín (1959) — The priest who tries to live the Gospel literally and is destroyed for it — Viridiana's brother film, and just as unsparing about piety colliding with the world.
• Tristana (1970) — Deneuve as the ward of a high-minded gentleman whose private appetite slowly consumes her — the Belle de Jour co-star in Buñuel's quietest, cruelest study of respectable hypocrisy.
• Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) — Jeanne Moreau's chambermaid moving through a rotting bourgeois estate on the edge of fascism — Buñuel's class satire in a colder, more pointed key.
• The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) — The impeccably mannered Mexico City bachelor convinced a music box lets him kill — the black-comic cousin to these, where polite appetite turns murderous and absurd.
• The Servant (1963) — Losey and Pinter's manservant who seduces and quietly dismantles his aristocrat master — the English-language film that rhymes with Theorem's intruder tearing a well-heeled household apart.