MovieChat Forums > Week End (1968) Discussion > comparison to Luis Buñuel's The Discreet...

comparison to Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie


the absurdist humor, critique of bourgeois values, and narrative structure remind me of Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. personally, I think Discreet Charm is funnier than Week End, but Godard's film is more interesting because it makes better use of film language... it uses Brechtian alienation and "anti-cinematic" techniques to challenge the viewer and question the nature of the film itself. when I first saw Discreet Charm, I thought it fell flat because it's satire wasn't a cohesive one. rather it was a series of jokes strung together that never made up a whole. although one could make the same critique of Week End, the very structure of the film itself makes this more difficult.

also note that one of the title cards in Week End reads "the exterminating angel" - the title of an earlier Buñuel film. having not seen that film, I'm not sure how to interpret that.

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In 'the exterminating angel', guests at a dinner party (sound familiar?!) are inexplicably unable to leave the dining room and remain there for days, bound by some curse or malevolent force and their bourgeois sensibility. I assume the exterminating angel is whatever exacts this ordeal on the dinner guests.

As it appears in the film, it's implied that Joseph Balsam is the exterminating angel, and he has the supernatural power and scathing sense of humour of Bunuel's film.

Personally, I prefer 'Weekend', the 'Discreet Charm...' for it's playfulness in technique, it's really a series of sketches, some of which work much better than others, but it's episodic nature allows the film to reinvent itself with each new scene.

The funniest Bunuel film I've seen is 'Phantom of Liberty', for sure.

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"The Exterminating Angel" is a biblical reference. In English, it is translated as "The Destroying Angel". The Bunuel film was also an attack on the bourgeoisie, though not so virulent a one as Godard's. It would seem, given the context, that the "angel" is one who will come to wipe out the moneyed classes.

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Yes, "The exterminating angel" is a clear allusion to Buñuel's film, hence the inclusion of the sheeps. (In Buñuel's film the sheeps, the sacrifice, were a clear allusion to the students murdered by the government.

I do prefer this to the "Discreet charm.." That's not a great Buñuel film for me.
However I had really liked this movie until the garbage truck rant, before that I think he had managed to make his point clear in a subtle, humorous and effective way. Then the charm is gone and the end feels more like shock-value.

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Personally i'm a bigger fan of "discreet charm...", i think it's a much more intriguing film to watch than Weekend. I did like the title shots however, but it's still no comparison to the surreal dinner party dreams of Discreet.

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I am from the US living in Argentina and married to an Argentine woman. We were just watching Weekend and I mentioned to her the Cortázar connection, and she said she thought something seemed familiar about the story line! This is the centenary of Cortar's birth. Hard to imagine the televisión people being so clever, but maybe they actually did plan to show this in his honor. Wow.











If life were really like the movies, I would not have to watch movies.

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I agree, I also prefer Weekend as I felt it put it's argument forward in a much more forceful manner. It was also a joy to watch the experimentalism whereas Bunuels film, while being a phenomenal film i didn't feel that it brought much new to the cinematic table, it did of course bring a fresh angle but it didn't feel anywhere near as radical as Weekend, though few films do and Bunuel can be said to be one of the few who has created one of these.

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Saw this for the first time yesterday and I was thinking Bunuel the whole way through.

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Week End succeeds at making Bunuel look like the superior filmmaker. Luc Godard shows no restraint but it comes off very much contrived. Bunuel meticulously crafts his films to the point that they become inimitable. Bunuel is the quintessential voice on the bourgeoisie in film.

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Exactly; I found Weekend insufferable.

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I see more similarities between this movie and Bunuel's The Milky Way. Both are road movies that feature characters interacting with a variety of absurd symbolic, historical, and literary figures. In fact, in the special features of the Criterion DVD of The Milky Way, Jean-Claude Carrier talks about how he and Bunuel were "disturbed" by Godard's film.

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I'm not going to touch on the main topic of this thread, but I'd like to address this little portion of your comment:

critique of bourgeois values


I almost felt as though the film was satirizing films that criticize the bourgeouis by portraying our bourgeois couple as almost satanic in their depravity, conflating them with every evil there is and creating a rather comical effect, subtler than, but similar to, the Dr Evil character in Austin Powers.

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