Last fall marked the fifty-year anniversary of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a surreal, plot-light comedy about the waking anxieties of the upper classes in France. Filmed three years after the May 1968 protests, following President Charles de Gaulle’s shaky triumph over the largest student-led general strike ever attempted in the country, Discreet Charm sees its wealthy sextet drift from soiree to soiree, dreaming of their own embarrassment and demise. The anniversary couldn’t have come at a better time.
The U.S. film industry seemed to have all but forgotten the concept of class until Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was a surprise hit in 2019. Since then, film and TV studios have inundated us with class comedies, thrillers, dramas, whodunits, and gnarled combinations of all of the above. Last year, there was Triangle of Sadness, which satirizes gender roles and exploitation aboard a luxury yacht; The Menu, a horror revenge fantasy about service-worker exploitation at a gourmet restaurant; Glass Onion, about, among other things, Elon Musk; and the second season of The White Lotus, which, like the first, takes a knock at the high-end resort crowd, but this time with lighter punches.
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