Laughing All the Way to the Grave

Following a group of well-tailored, mannerly bourgeois as they trudge from pillar to post in search of a decent place to eat dinner, Discreet Charm compiles eerie campfire ghost stories, smutty sight gags, teasingly unfinished anecdotes, and errant smudges of political satire. The author whom Buñuel loved above all others was de Sade, and one can see in this film the director's affection for the ornamental, elegant language with which the Marquis enumerated unspeakable horrors. Pastel-colored and genteel, Discreet Charm anticipates the American trend toward foreign films that detail sunny Mediterranean locales and fine dining--except that Buñuel's version cannibalizes both characters and audience. (By the way: Is the comic doc The Aristocrats not a sort of meta-version of an anecdote in a late Buñuel movie?)

The greatest of all Buñuel's films, however, stands at the crossroads between brutalism and mannerism, between his middle- and late-period styles. Belle de jour (October 2) must've been conceived by its producers as an opportunity for the maestro to detour into the fashionable high-class smut of the time. Severine (Catherine Deneuve) is a young Parisian wife who's bored with her nice-guy husband and tantalized by gossipy whispers of a pricy whorehouse where the ladies of the evening work by day. Buñuel strews the fallen matron's path to rack and ruin with inscrutable gags and pregnant hunks of foreshadowing that almost literally define Freud's "uncanny." Shot in a pearly, immaculate style, with hair, makeup, clothing, and bibelots styled right down to the molecule (eat your heart out, Michael Mann!), Belle de jour is both clear as a bell and as unknowable as an ancient ruin--a winkingly chauvinist paean to the Mysteries of Womankind that extends into an ode to the mystery of human experience. The unimpeachable concreteness of the movie's visual form, combined with Deneuve's rigorously blank performance, creates a perfect Sadean reworking of the enigmas Buñuel saw carved on the interiors of the Saragossan churches of his boyhood.

You'll find none of Ingmar Bergman's self-important breast-beating or Fellini's bombast and schmaltz in these movies. Indeed, it is the almost ugly plainness of Buñuel's style that has kept him in currency all these decades--but also, more important, the films' nonpartisan nature. In his opposition to every form of sentiment, to delusion, tribalism, and the romanticizing of one's superior position, Buñuel leaves himself, and us, free to indulge openly in what he does espouse: laughter, morbid eroticism, and indulgent sensuality. Yes, it's likely that your car will be bombed, your house flooded with rain, your kneecaps blown off by some acronym-sporting death squad you've never heard of. Till then, lick the last drops of bitters and gin off the melting ice cubes at the bottom of your glass.