Trailer
Plot summary
François and Simone Thévenot bring Don Rafael Acosta, the ambassador of Miranda, and Simone's sister Florence to dine at the Sénéchals' home. Alice Sénéchal tells them she had them down for the next evening and has nothing ready. The visitors ask her to join them at an inn nearby, where a waitress mentions new management, the room is empty of diners, and the party hurries out on learning of a vigil held for the manager, dead only hours before. The following day Acosta, François and Henri Sénéchal discuss what a large cocaine sale has brought in at the Mirandan embassy. Acosta fires a rifle at one clockwork toy offered by a young woman outside and calls her a member of a Maoist group that has hunted him for months.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Luis Buñuel was famously indifferent to awards and joked to a reporter that he had already paid a $25,000 bribe to win the Oscar. When the academy asked him to pose with the statuette, he wore a wig and oversized sunglasses.
- Luis Buñuel had said Tristana would be his last film, but producer Serge Silberman's anecdote about forgetting a dinner party and finding six hungry friends at his door inspired him, and Silberman gave him a $2,000 advance to write the script with Jean-Claude Carrière.
- Buñuel let Delphine Seyrig and Stéphane Audran choose which parts they wanted and then changed the script to suit them, and he cast Jean-Pierre Cassel after simply glancing at him once during his audition.
- Buñuel joked that whenever he needed an extra scene he simply filmed one of his own dreams. The film includes three of his recurring dreams: being on stage and forgetting his lines, meeting his dead cousin in the street and following him into a cobwebbed house, and waking to see his dead parents staring at him.
- On producer Serge Silberman's advice, Buñuel used video playback monitors on the set for the first time in his career, which led to extensive zooms and tracking shots instead of his usual close-ups and static camera framing.
