The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Where the DNA of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie travels
Films it shaped
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He cited Luis Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, as well as Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, as influences on his sense of a fantastical narrative colliding with reality.
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With 'The Square' I tried to make a more Buñuelian film, similar to 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie', where you have different scenes connected more by theme than by narrative logic, taking place in slightly different places, but still within the same world.
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It's a bit like Buñuel, you know, 'Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' where actors are speaking in other languages. It’s a great way to work. It’s liberating. So you focus on performance, and emotion.
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Bong Joon-ho has said Lee Chang-dong taught him that genre films could carry the weight of social critique without becoming lectures, that entertainment and political anger could share the same frame. Burning and Secret Sunshine are the films that built the tradition Parasite sits inside. But the deeper ancestor is Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), a Korean film about class resentment in a domestic space, which Bong has called the founding text of Korean cinema. It's on MUBI.
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Adaptation. Atlas note
When charting the labyrinthine, self-reflexive narrative of Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze looked toward the European traditions that first fractured the cinematic fourth wall. The film functions as a deeply neurotic American companion piece to Federico Fellini's 8 ½, mirroring its protagonist's crippling creative paralysis and hopelessly blurring the boundary between the author and his creation. Furthermore, François Truffaut's Day for Night served as a structural touchstone for exposing the messy, agonizing, and often humiliating process of filmmaking itself. Kaufman has also cited Luis Buñuel's surrealist masterwork The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie as an essential influence in designing a reality where absolute absurdity is treated with deadpan sincerity.
