Still Life: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Re-Released After 40 Years

When every major studio is in a seemingly endless race with each other over who can remake the most movies in the shortest amount of time, another form of revisiting old magic is striving to persist; that of simply re-releasing the original. And no, not with the blasted 3D tag attached, where you’ll be forced to pay a premium to watch a childhood favorite – NOW WITH ADDED HEADACHE! – but simply showing a new generation exactly what made the olden days, where you didn’t get a new smartphone every three days, worth living.

And so the UK will be treated to a re-mastered, digitalised version of Luis Bunuel‘s surreal comedy masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie starting next weekend, June 29.

Luis Bunuel is perhaps the second-most well known surrealist filmmaker in history, after David Lynch, and first became (in)famous for his 1929 short film collaboration with one Salvador Dalí, Un chien andalou. Bunuel went on to make some of the greatest surrealist films of all time, including Belle de jour, El ángel exterminador and the subject of this post.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie concerns, in short, six upper-middle class people and their repeatedly interrupted attempts to have a meal together. It’s far from a linear story, taking on a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream logic more than once and more than twice (and we’re not talking about the easy-to-digest Inception-type of dream construct, either). The poster above gives only a limited hint at what sort of madness we’re talking about.

Sure, it’s not a massive megahit like The Lion King or Jurassic Park, but that makes its re-release even more appreciated in my eyes.

Click any of the pictures below for a gallery of images from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie: