Dreams Within Dreams in Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Dreams within dreams within dreams, that’s Luis Bunuel’s 1972 feature film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Normally, when a filmmaker uses the trope of ‘it was all a dream’ I get annoyed. But the elegant and deconstuctionist way that Bunuel employs the trope makes it work. The dream within a dream within a dream structure in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie enhances the storytelling while taking the trope and turning it into a charming running gag.

Ostensibly, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is about a group of six friends trying to get together for a meal. I say they are trying to get together because each time they do, something happens that prevents them from actually sitting down to eat. In the first instance, four members of the group arrive at the home of the other two friends, a couple. They are there for a cocktail party. When they arrive, they are the only guests and the hostess is in her bed-casual clothes. The group came to the party one night early.

Wanting a meal, the group, along with their hostess, head to a nearby restaurant inn. It appears to be closed but as they go to leave, a waitress comes to the door and invites them in. Here again, they are the only guests, no one but the staff is inside the restaurant. It’s all very strange and they consider leaving but drinks are served and they begin to settle in. Then, from a nearby room, they hear crying. The three female members of the group feeling empathy for the tears go to see what is the matter. What they find is that the owner of the restaurant has died and his body is in repose in this room where his wife is mourning him.

Seeing this, the group decides to leave the grieving wife and staff. No food is eaten and our group heads home. The next attempt at a group meal is back at the home of our hostess. She and her husband have invited the other four members of our core cast for an afternoon lunch. However, husband and wife have seemingly forgotten about lunch because as their guests arrive they are about to have sex. Overcome with lust and in fear that their guests will hear their cries of passion, the couple sneak out of the house to make love in the nearby bushes. Having waited nearly half an hour, the guests leave in a huff.

And so it goes, each time this group tries to sit down for a meal they are interrupted by an ever increasing amount of oddity and chaos. Bunuel delights in his starving party guests, lingering over finding unique and strange ways that he can keep them from enjoying a meal. It’s a surrealist wonder to watch the strangely humorous ways in which the guests are interrupted or prevented from eating. Bunuel isn’t focused primarily on the food or the hunger but rather the strange customary propriety with which these bourgeois, upper middle class people deal with the constant interruptions.

Eventually, the interruptions of their meals begin to manifest themselves inside the dreams of the men in the party. Each has a strange dream that involves nearly eating before being interrupted by shocking violence. One the men dreams that a member of their party shoots the host of a party they’ve been invited to. Another dreams that the party is arrested on unspecified charges and everyone is jailed. The jail sequence is a dream within another dream and involves a zombie Police Captain. It’s wonderfully strange and surreal.

In another sequence, the entire party is gunned down by thugs. The last of the party, having hidden under a table, is caught when he can’t resist reaching up to the table to grab a piece of Lamb Shank. Again, it’s surreal and darkly comic as this too has become a running joke in the movie, the dreams but also how they’ve reached a state of hunger worth risking their lives to satiate. This sequence is the cherry on top of the sundae of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a surreal violence undone by yet another character awakening to dash the deaths away.

If one were inclined you could read many things into these sequences in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. There has been scholarly writing about Bunuel as a class warrior, mocking the upper middle class protagonists by preventing them from their feasts and heaping indignities upon them in the process. That’s a perfectly reasonable read of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. I don’t see the movie that way but I understand the reasoning.

My feeling is that nothing really means anything. I believe Bunuel is toying with film itself. He’s toying with tropes and characters and our expectations. He’s toying with our imagination and how we expect a story to unfold in a perfectly linear fashion. I believe that Bunuel is entertaining himself above all else. He is delighting in his ideas and creating a muted farce, one where there are plenty of laughs but no big guffaws, no obvious gags. The humor arises out of oddity and awkwardness. It’s in the slight indignities suffered, the strange asides and non-sequitur anecdotes played out in dreams.

It’s a strange and wonderful form of humor and it’s why I have fallen so deeply in love with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has been given a 4K makeover and is returning to the big screen in several big cities on June 24th, 2022. If you are near a place showing this movie, go out of your way to see it. It’s a delightful experiment in form and an impish sort of humor that I find irresistible.