Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a wonderful film that explores many of the themes present in the director’s work in great depth. The three most prevalent in Buñuel’s oeuvre and present in this film are class disparity, religion, and surrealism (in the form of dreams). The film starts out pretty unassuming, following the lives of several elites as they live, eat, and discreetly traffic drugs across border nations. As tensions rise and relationships break down, several characters experience dreams in which their wildest fears come true. For the soldier with a traumatic past, he finds himself walking down an empty street as specters approach and talk to him before disappearing again. For the priest turned gardener, he dreams of coming face to face with his parent’s killer as he delivers his last rites. In one of the most surreal sequences, one of the elites dreams that a dinner with his socialite friends is instead an elaborate stage play with a packed audience, only he’s forgotten his lines. These sequences explore the characters’ fears and bring the audience into a state that makes them question the validity of anything they’ve seen. When the priest kills the sinner in his dream, we’re forced to question his faith and the purpose of holy forgiveness (though very few in that situation would be able to resist such an urge). Even the beginning of the film comes into question as the minister leaps from his bed to finish off a roast from the fridge alone in the kitchen.