le charme discret des français

The word "droll" is an anglicization of the French word drôle. The French word means "funny", in all the senses in which we use the word: comical, odd, strange, or quaint. But because we already have the word "funny", English-speakers do not, in my experience, use "droll" in the basic sense of "comical". Even using the Frenchy word at all is pretentious, giving the remaining meanings a strong connotation of looking down one's nose.

Enter La Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. Winner of the 1972 Best Foreign Film Oscar, lauded worldwide by critics, film makers, and film students, it is the quintessential droll film. And thus, despite the fact that its director, Luis Buñuel, is Spanish, quintessentially French.

It's not "ha-ha" funny, or quaint, but it's definitely odd. Or at least, it must have seemed odd in 1972. In the era of David's Lynch and Cronenberg, it just seems cold, gimmicky, but mostly, pretentious.

The basic structure - there's no real story - revolves around a get-together for a bunch of socialites. Some surreal violence intrudes, at which point one of them wakes up, and realizes it was all a dream. He's late for the real dinner party, which is also bizarre. But it's still only a dream. And so on.

It sounds like a recipe for failing a beginning screenwriting class. Write yourself into a corner - presto! It was all just a dream. And when evaluated as a movie, rather than a work of art on film, Le Charme discret does fail. It is only very faintly amusing, has no real point, the characters are neither well drawn nor developed. Compared to Mulholland Dr. or Night of the Hunter, the film's not even particularly surreal. It's fine art - more like a painting than a narrative fiction film.

Good or bad art, I don't know - and don't particularly care. I watch movies for entertainment, and maybe sometimes to learn something about life or the world. At the very least, if it's a comedy, I expect to be amused.