Buñuel’s fascination with the discreet charms of these bourgeois characters is twofold. On the one hand, ultrapolite, good-looking civilization hides, or even nurtures, impressive acts of savagery and criminality. A bishop commits murder, high-ranking government officials smuggle drugs and remain immune to the law, dissidents are cruelly tortured. This complicated interplay of normality and transgression is taken for granted by Buñuel as the status quo—just the way things are in the rotten modern world.

But he also delights in showing how, on the other hand, that balance can so easily come unstuck. Too many embarrassing or needling questions from a colonel (Claude Piéplu) to Don Rafael about the politics of Miranda (the country he represents as ambassador) lead to a deadly duel right in the midst of a reception. And discretion gives way to flagrant indiscretion whenever the most basic human appetites—hunger or lust—force their way into the foreground of a situation. A couple’s itch for amour fou leads to the abandonment of their assembled guests, while the compulsion to chomp on a decent piece of meat gives Rafael away just when he should be hiding from a terrorist’s machine gun.

The dream state is social in Discreet Charm but also historical and political. A running gag covers up the “incriminating” evidence of named names with outrageous sound effects, as if the film has already been worked over by government censors. More acutely, the film depicts no small amount of political violence. Buñuel became fascinated by the growing phenomenon of global terrorism in the seventies, both for its gestures of romantic anarchy (Buñuel’s own preferred rhetoric in his youth) and for its disturbing ambiguity: too often simply a mirror of the violence of the state itself, and corrupted from within by sabotage or plain human whimsy. Hence the dreams and nightmares of the bourgeoisie naturally include kidnappings, assassinations, torture—an entire theater of mass death writ large. In fact, death figures, in one way or another, in every single vignette of Discreet Charm. Silberman recalled: “For Buñuel—for many—death is an obsession.”

But these themes rarely seem to disturb the film’s composure. The artist who began from the in-your-face surrealist shocks of Un chien andalou (1929) progressively moved toward a slyly subtle, nearly “invisible” style that might have been at home in classical Hollywood, and Discreet Charm marks the apogee of this process of refinement in Buñuel’s career. The work of director of photography Edmond Richard (who had collaborated with Orson Welles during the sixties), and the way it is integrated with the director’s staging, is consistently astonishing. The film’s fluidity is clinched in a constant interweaving of foreground and background spaces, with the actors darting this way and that (keep a close eye on Milena Vukotic as the Sénéchals’ maid) as the camera reframes each new configuration of characters with a subtle pan or slight zoom (study the first meeting of everyone in the Sénéchal home). Each well-placed cut within a scene prepares the ground for a redrawn choreography of bodies.

“Buñuel begins, essentially, from stereotypes that he treats satirically or tenderly. But then the types, as it were, float.”

In her 2019 autobiography J’ai oublié (I’ve forgotten), Bulle Ogier recalls the joy of this shoot on which “we never stopped laughing”—while also noting that, like Jacques Rivette or Manoel de Oliveira, Don Luis (“no one ever addressed him as Luis”) could easily suspend a day or two of filming in order to mull over and work on a scene with the actors. Ogier describes the sequence of the six central characters walking endlessly “along a flat, country road” as one that was in neither the script nor the shooting schedule; “it came to his mind during filming.” Buñuel placed these shots at strategic intervals in the film, evoking a mininarrative that mirrors the larger structure: at first, twenty-nine minutes in, the characters stroll calmly in the sunshine; forty-four minutes later, the light is darker and the group behavior is harried, distracted; and at the very end, before the camera adopts a distant view, before the image blurs out and the credits roll, everyone seems somewhat troubled but ultimately resigned to their eternal lot of walking, walking—with no end in sight.

For Ogier, this sequence expresses a very particular aspect of Buñuel’s creativity. For, although these characters were “precisely delineated” on the page, Buñuel loved also to film the “more and less” of them. What does this mean? Buñuel’s approach is paradoxical. He begins, essentially, from stereotypes (the bishop, the politician, the servant, the farmer, etc.) that he treats satirically or tenderly. But then the types, as it were, float. These figures commit acts that would seem to be radically out of character (as when the bishop picks up a rifle and kills the man he has just absolved). Potential intrigues are hinted at but never flower into story lines—as with the unforgettable woman (Muni, a Buñuel regular) who declares her hatred for Jesus Christ, or Ogier’s own character of Florence, whose bouts of drunkenness and instability (her neuroses include, as she begins to tell us, “Euclid’s complex”) do not generate any specific melodrama.

Above all, the relationships between characters are never given to us all at once, in an opening exposition, as most directors would routinely do. It takes a good while for the film to definitively establish that Florence and Simone are sisters, that François and Simone are married, and that Rafael and Simone are having an affair. On this level, too, the characters float, are never entirely “there.”