The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Fuck your screenplay books. Fuck your Hero With A Thousand Faces monomyth, fuck your Syd Field's Screenplay, fuck your The Writer's Journey, triple-fuck your Save The Cat, even fuck the flexible and non-prescriptive Robert McKee Story and Dan Harmon story circle. Fuck Die Hard. Oh, and fuck the five-paragraph essay format they drill into you in high school, while I'm at it. The possibilities of narrative art is more than a formula, more than rules and beats. The audience does not deserve catharsis — it deserves something more.

All that matters is that you have drive. Every scene, every line, should have a function and something to intrigue the viewer — this is the essence of drama. Drive means momentum, that every moment propels the audience forwards. Not necessarily to a conclusion that satisfies the hanging threads of a plot, but certainly in service to a thematic need. The traditional three-act structure how-to books will harp on is merely a functional means to this end, but there are other ways.

It is fascinating that, in this respect at least, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is the most avant-garde film from this month I've seen yet. Yes, granted, it's made by Luis Bunuel, who palled around with Salvador Dali, but when pit against Eraserhead and Naked Lunch the notion seems immediately silly. Eraserhead is a claustrophobic, stilted, unsettling nightmare world, bearing only the slightest resemblance to our own, even on the level of human-to-human interaction, where a woman with mashed potato cheeks crushes giant spermatozoa under her high heels, heads become erasers, and most moments are represented in a highly elliptical symbolic manner instead of straightforwardly. Ultimately, though, we experience an Act I, in which Henry procures a baby, an Act II, in which he is slowly pushed to his limit caring for it, and Act III, in which he murders it. Naked Lunch's plot, or perhaps "plot," about bug typewriters double-crossing secret agents in the Interzone, serves mostly as a distraction, a shell game with transparent cups, really, from the actual STORY, which is William Lee escaping his grief over the accidental murder of his wife into a paranoid, drug-induced hallucinatory world, and when he finally confronts it head-on, the movie ends, resolved, despite the secret agent story not having wrapped up yet.

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, on the other hand, despite the appearance of a straightforward tale about well-dressed people acting in sensible ways in equally mannered environments with blandly functional cinematography, is much more structurally adventurous, even downright contemptuous of all notions of story-as-reality. As it teaches us, appearances are more than deceptive, they are deception itself. Take the bishop character, for example. In gardener's clothes, he is rebuffed as a stranger by the bourgeoisie, but returning in his bishop's clothes, they kiss his hand. He explains that he wishes to become a "working bishop," which is like a "working priest," except he's a bishop. Later, a woman comes by requiring a priest to come accept an old, poor man's deathbed penance, and he says he's a priest (not a bishop,) and goes off. But before we take this holy man, the man who has thus far displayed not an ounce of sin nor hypocrisy, at face value, he turns into a more brutal Batman and shoots the old, poor man in the face after he admits to the crime of murdering the priest/bishop's parents. Interesting? Functional? Illuminating about not only the character but human nature in general? Yes, in the extreme! Foreshadowed? Following an arc? Forging a profound change of character in the fires of conflict? Relevant to the goings-on of the rest of the characters on any level beyond the thematic? Forget about it!

The narrative zigs and zags and never settles in — much like its, for lack of a better word, protagonists' journey — before it reveals that the previous scene and God only knows how many of the others were but dreams, not once, not twice, but thrice, saving the last for the very end. Minor characters repeatedly put the central players of the story on pause to tell their life story, as in Kafka's The Castle, where this technique is extended past all sense and repeated ad nauseum until, ultimately, ending mid-sentence right as we are about to be launched into yet another lengthy exposition. But The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is never an unsatisfying film, never seems to aimlessly meander, because every scene stabs at the heart of its themes, functions, intrigues, and gets out before it wears out its welcome, a tricky balancing act.