This blog post explores why Mathieu remains trapped in the cycle of unfulfilled desire through Buñuel’s film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” By analyzing the structure of illusion and deprivation created by the two-faced Conchita, we examine the essence of desire.
Surrealist films were as difficult to approach as their obscure themes. After searching anxiously through various channels, I finally managed to obtain a copy of the film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” by the surrealist master director Luis Buñuel through an obscure route. The director behind this film, whose very title is ambiguous, is Luis Buñuel, who debuted with the surrealist masterpiece “Un Chien Andalou” (1928). In fact, despite its short runtime of just over 17 minutes, “Un Chien Andalou” featured horrific scenes. As someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy the slasher genre, I couldn’t hide my discomfort throughout the entire class. It made me wonder if this was truly the only form surrealism, as a philosophical concept, could take when introduced into the medium of film. Countless scenes, each appearing like an independent image, simply transitioned rapidly. A palm swarming with ants, a man caressing a beautiful statue in ecstasy, a decaying donkey carcass placed on a piano without context, a close-up of a woman’s eye being precisely sliced open with a razor blade—a succession of inexplicable images, the kind one might only see in a nightmare, unfolded. Yet the fact that this film, which didn’t even screen in this theater, had become a seminal work of surrealist and avant-garde cinema was beyond surprising—it was shocking.
Struggling to even summarize the plot, I was in a state of panic. Barely escaping that state, I searched for another film and stumbled upon The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Produced in 1978, this film maintains ambiguity right to the end, true to its title. Two actresses portray the female lead, Conchita, and the film is peppered with perplexing endings and scenes defying conventional understanding, strongly revealing its surrealist tendencies. That said, the film as a whole doesn’t feel excessively obscure or overly heavy. The apparent tug-of-war of desire between Mathieu, a wealthy middle-aged bachelor, and Conchita, a young, beautiful but poor woman, is a seemingly elegant name that actually elicits laughter.
The film is narrated through the male protagonist Mathieu’s perspective. Consequently, nearly every scene is composed of facts reinterpreted from a male viewpoint. It adopts a structure where the male subject’s gaze observes the female object. Consequently, the female character appears like Janus’s two faces, with two actresses alternating in the role. In the film, Mathieu exhausts every effort to obtain Conchita’s body, but Conchita, wielding her virginity as a weapon, only extracts money and a home from him, never yielding her body. The tug-of-war between the man who wants to possess and the woman who refuses to give continues throughout the film. Mathieu provides everything Conchita desires, yet all he receives in return is coldness and scorn. Ultimately, unable to control his rage, he drives her away, beats her until her face is bruised and bleeding, and even pours water over her. Yet, despite this, he clings to her once more.
This absurd relationship alone creates a sufficiently chaotic situation, but the contrasting atmospheres of the two actresses playing Conchita—Carol Bouquet with her intellectual image and Angela Molina with her sensual charm—make the audience share Mathieu’s confusion directly. Yet these two actresses effectively embody Conchita as both two and one. Through this, the audience comes to understand that Mathieu’s beloved is not the real Conchita, but rather an image he has created—a fantasy onto which he projects his desires. As their relationship is constructed through Mathieu’s explanations, the two Conchitas ultimately represent the various facets of Conchita as he perceives her. Mathieu, who perceives one woman as two separate entities, does not love her as he claims. Rather, he desires the ‘absent one’. He has created this woman of illusion himself, embodying the polar opposites of intellectual and sensual aspects.
Unable to possess Conchita, she becomes the object of his desire. He nurtures the desire to unite with her in his imagination, and this desire materializes into the fantasy structure of two Conchitas. Yet this fantasy can never be realized. As Mathieu himself states, he feels that if he were to obtain everything Conchita desires, he would cease to love her. Desire stems from lack; when lack disappears, desire vanishes; without desire, the fantasy dissolves. Thus, Conchita, the fundamental symbol of lack, remains split into two until the end, and Mathieu, desiring the unfillable, cannot escape the structure of fantasy. “The Ambiguous Object of Desire” thus leaves a message about the fundamental human psychology of desiring the endlessly absent.
Meanwhile, the terrorism and inexplicable scenes that intersect their relationship and appear throughout the film—the woman cradling a pig like a baby and Mathieu’s encounter with her, the woman embroidering on a bloodstained white cloth in a shop window, the old man carrying a large sack, and Mathieu holding that sack at some point, the final explosion scene, etc.—double the film’s ambiguity. These scenes, which make it impossible to determine what they symbolize or even if they hold any meaning at all, cast a deep veil of ambiguity over the entire film. Combining contradictory and opposing elements within a single frame, or placing specific objects in environments detached from their context to evoke visual shock and a sense of mystery, can be described as the application of dépeuplement. Through this, the screen forms an unfamiliar, mythical atmosphere, and by having two different dimensions coexist within a single frame, it acquires a three-dimensional, or even four-dimensional, depth.
Such ambiguous films bear a striking resemblance to the everyday realities of modern society, where indecipherable and uncertain events occur. While humans frequently encounter absurd scenes in reality, they rarely feel emotions as intense as the bewilderment evoked by this film; instead, they tend to accept it naturally. This is likely because events encountered in daily life are perceived within the framework of reality. The film depicts this everyday life through incomprehensible scenes, yet it delivers a peculiar, liberating sensation, as if freeing the human unconscious. So why does this feeling arise?
In the ending scene, the two protagonists (or perhaps three) continue walking, bickering. And behind them, a bomb explodes. They were likely blown to pieces, vanishing without a trace. It’s a truly absurd setup, yet simultaneously, I found myself thinking, ‘Why do beings destined to vanish so futilely cling so desperately, fight so fiercely, and live so foolishly?’ At some point, I was even captivated by a strange sensation, a creeping feeling that ‘those two are so infuriating, I’d rather just blow them away with a bomb.’ It was an emotion similar to the shock delivered by the scene in the movie “Dogville” where the entire town is burned to the ground at the end.
