MYOFNF #1: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (dir. Luis Bunuel, 1972)

My first foreign classic of the year is Luis Bunuel's piece of deadpan absurdism. It's a series of largely plotless vignettes about five content upper class French drug dealers (and one crooked South American diplomat) trying to have dinner together while constantly being interrupted by complications of escalating weirdness. It's genuinely funny, the satire of upper class mores cutting. The characters don't really stand out as individuals, but that's the point: their monumental complacency has melted their personalities into oblivion. The only way they can continue to live comfortably while surrounded by such madness and cruelty is to keep their concerns and conversations as banal as possible. You can't live that way for long without it sandblasting the features right off of your personality. Bunuel directs with a mixture of elegant tracking shots and flat-footed stationary shots, and while there isn't a lot of emotional impact, there are several stricking tableau that prove substantially haunting: like the dinner guests finding themselves suddenly on a stage before booing audience members, and the recurring scene of the companions trudging silently down a country road, without a destination in sight.

American film it clearly influenced: early Steven Soderbergh, particularly Schizopolis.

Next: a double dose of post-war tumult and budding existentialism from Japan and Italy, a couple of countries that got their asses kicked: Akira Kurasowa's Stray Dog and Vittoria De Sica's The Bicycle Thief.