Favourite films are always the hardest ones to write about: having to maintain the right balance of passion and honesty (is it really that good?), the desire to do it full justice with the need for brevity. And The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has always been my favourite film by Luis Buñuel, who is still probably my favourite film-maker (a recent retrospective in London reminded me just why), so the task becomes all the harder - or at least it felt that way before I sat down to watch it for the first time in over a decade.

But in the event, the film is so lucid, stiletto-sharp and blissfully funny (of all the cinema's authentic works of genius, this is easily one of the most sheerly enjoyable) that any reservations evaporated right from the opening scene. Despite being built on arguably the most intricate foundation of any Buñuel film, it's a marvel of coherence and clarity - even at its weirdest (and this film delves into areas that even the likes of David Lynch would shy away from) it remains remarkably accessible throughout. Indeed, it won the 1972 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, though as far as Buñuel was concerned that was a mixed blessing: the same bourgeoisie that he sought to destroy ended up showering the film with praise.

The basic plot couldn't be simpler: six pillars of society (five of them French, the sixth the ambassador of a fictional Latin American country) make recurring attempts to have a meal together. Every time, they get interrupted , firstly by entirely plausible events (the proprietor of a restaurant mysteriously dying, a café running out of supplies), but as the film progresses thes interruptions gradually get stranger and stranger, until the entire narrative turns out to be built on a complex, shifting structure of dreams within dreams within dreams, to the point where you're no longer sure what's reality or indeed whose dream it is (a telling line begins "I dreamed that Sénéchal dreamed that…").

It's at this point that the title becomes truly inspired, even though it was chosen long after shooting at a very late stage after a trawl through dictionaries and thesauruses to find the most appropriate adjective. Discretion and charm are what keep these people going, casually brushing aside the most peculiar obstacles (Arrested by the police and locked up in the cells within earshot of a terrorist suspect being electrocuted to the point where cockroaches pour out of his head? No matter, there's always tomorrow's soirée to look forward to!) with a nonchalance that's both delightful and more than a little disturbing. Buñuel and his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière have a whale of a time lampooning the drivel that their characters spout, whether it's vacuous astrological gibberish, meaningless social rituals or carefully-phrased diplomatic waffle as two people who clearly despise each other maintain a façade of polite interest.

There's no doubt that Buñuel utterly loathes these people with every fibre of his being - but by the time he reached 72 he knew that there was little he could do about them. It's obviously an old man's film, but in the best sense: the anger and anarchic fervour of his early work has been replaced by a calm serenity, as though he realised that a lifetime of attacking, ridiculing and humiliating the bourgeoisie had had no impact whatsoever. So here, he just sits back and watches them, letting them dig their own graves, measuring out just the right amount of rope.

So given a decidedly fissured, cut-up approach to narrative and six essentially dislikeable lead characters, the casting was critically important - but in the event it's faultless: easily the best ensemble ever to grace a Buñuel film (they're far more distinctive and memorable than the largely faceless ensemble of the not dissimilar The Exterminating Angel).

Fernando Rey is at his genial best as Rafael Acosta, the ambassador of Miranda, his avuncular manner neatly concealing the absolute moral rot within (I laughed out loud when he defended his habit of sheltering murderous war criminals - in the wake of the Pinochet affair, this has gained more than a little resonance), while the other actors beautifully encapsulate various facets of the French upper middle classes, especially the women: the impossibly svelte, elegant Simone Thévenot (Delphine Seyrig); confident mistress of the house Alice Sénéchal (Stéphane Audran); trendy young astrology-fixated chainsmoking proto-Sloane Florence (Bulle Ogier). (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Paul Frankeur make less of an impact as Messrs Sénéchal and Thévenot, largely because one would expect the women would tend to dominate the social gatherings that make up the film).

Two other performances stand out: Julien Bertheau as Monsignor Dufour, the bishop who hires himself out as the Sénéchals' gardener and gives Buñuel the opportunity to satirise both religion and the working classes, and Gérald Robart as Hubert de Rochcahin, the soldier who accosts Simone, Florence and Alice in the café and tells them the first of two dreams, where the film makes its first shift into the realm of the uncanny.

I always forget just how creepy these extended flashbacks are - and what makes them all the more effective is the fact that they and the numerous other dreams are shot so matter-of-factly: there's nothing to suggest that they're dreams other than their bizarre and inexplicable content. Right from the start of his career, Buñuel showed an uncommon mastery of the cinema - he always knew exactly how to frame a shot to best effect, when to move the camera, when to cut, and how to do it as unobtrusively and unpretentiously as possible. One of the many things that make his films so exhilarating is the fact that, despite the strangeness and dislocation that pervades them (more in this particular film than many of the others), he always knows exactly what he's doing: his clarity of vision puts just about everyone else working in the medium to shame.

You may have noticed that I'm deliberately avoiding a detailed description of the events in the film - if you've never seen it before (and it hasn't been that easy to see in recent years), the less you know in advance the better: much of the pleasure of the first viewing comes from near-constant surprise. But it repays endless revisits too: I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it (it's just about the only non-English-language film whose dialogue I know more or less off by heart!) - but every time I see something new, something that reminds me of how Buñuel is still miles ahead of most contemporary film-makers even though he's as old as the last century.

Of all the cinema's undisputed masters, Buñuel was arguably the least interested in technical or aesthetic matters: without question, he'd have utterly despised the paragraphs that I'm about to write purely on principle - if the film's ideas come across, does it really matter what the DVD transfer is like? And of course he'd be right: it doesn't - if the print isn't so badly damaged that it starts to affect comprehension, who cares?

Fortunately, though, Buñuel wasn't hired as a consultant on the DVD, because Criterion have done their usual superb job. I've seen plenty of prints of the film over the years, including one so scratched that it barely got through the projector - and this one is a revelation: it's in virtually perfect condition, barring a few barely noticeable spots and scratches (rather less, in fact, than you'd expect for a film nearly thirty years old), and by far the best copy I've seen to date in any medium.

The transfer, too, is state-of-the-art: anamorphic, framed at the correct 1.66:1 ratio (it's slightly windowboxed within the 16:9 frame, though this is barely noticeable) and retaining plenty of fine detail even in the much darker, shadowy dream sequences (the scene with the soldier's dead parents coming back to seek revenge is more vivid and chilling than in any other version I've seen, the blood oozing from his father's wound having an almost tangible stickiness). The colours, too, are gorgeous - pale and desaturated where necessary, thrillingly vivid elsewhere (just look at the reds in the background of the café sequence, or the poppies that the bishop plants at the start of chapter 14).

Occasionally, technical faults in the original print emerge: the opening shot has always looked underlit and pretty awful (though it's comfortably the worst shot in the entire film), the colours are sometimes a little unbalanced during dissolves - but these are very minor points and not something Criterion would have had any control over. Indeed, if you want a graphic demonstration of just how good the transfer is, have a look at the clips from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in the documentary on the second disc - these are rather closer to the scratched and faded prints I'm more familiar with!

The sound is, predictably, the original mono (a stereo Buñuel film is pretty much inconceivable - indeed, he was virtually deaf when he made this: the end credit "effets sonores - Luis Buñuel" is an in-joke), but there's absolutely nothing wrong with the transfer, which, like the picture, is razor-sharp and pretty much blemish-free. Given that the film is overwhelmingly dialogue-based, the acid test is the sound of the string quartet in chapter 6 where the women discuss the sonority of the cello, and said sonority comes across loud and clear. In short: no complaints whatsoever - as with the picture, any flaws are those of the original film. There are 21 chapter stops, singling out all the obvious highlights.

If any film can survive without extras, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie can - few films account so well for themselves or are less in need of a rational explanation. So when I heard Criterion were doing a double-disc special edition, once I'd got over my excitement I wondered what on earth they could be adding to it. I doubted there'd be much mileage from a production featurette, there are no special effects to speak of (or at least none of any great interest) and a commentary would be fairly useless given the fact that the film is open to an infinite variety of interpretations.

Actually, despite the number of discs, there are just three significant video supplements: the original theatrical trailer and two documentaries on Buñuel, one of which is as long as the main feature. In fact, Criterion could probably have crammed the lot onto a single disc (the total running time of Kino's single-DVD The Sacrifice is significantly longer), but almost certainly at the expense of the quality of the transfer, so I'm glad they didn't! I should also mention the accompanying leaflet, which contains an essay on the film by Carlos Fuentes and a printed recipe for Buñuel's idea of the perfect dry martini - and the second disc also throws in a complete Buñuel filmography.

The trailer is in amazingly good condition considering how poorly such things are often treated over the years: the print is almost as well-preserved as the main feature (slightly more contrasty, but there's not much in it), and it's been given an anamorphic transfer of similar quality. God knows what audiences of the time were supposed to make of it - but a Buñuel film was never going to be an easy sell! (Actually, this one was his biggest commercial success - even more than Belle de Jour - so it obviously worked!).

The first documentary, El náufrago de la calle de Providencia ('The Castaway on the Street of Providence') dates from 1970 - though was re-edited thirty years later - and was made by fellow film-makers and longterm Buñuel friends Arturo Ripstein and Rafael Castandeo. 'At Home with the Buñuels' might be an equally appropriate title, as that's essentially what it's about: it's a touching, immensely affectionate portrait of Luis and Jeanne Buñuel in their house in Mexico, with contributions from their friends of the time. It's in Spanish with compulsory English subtitles and lasts 25 minutes.

The second documentary, A proposito de Buñuel ('Regarding Buñuel') is so good that it could easily have been sold on its own, much like the David Lynch documentary Pretty as a Picture. Running an impressively meaty 99 minutes, it's both a chronological trot through Buñuel's life and work, loosely based on his marvellous autobiography My Last Sigh - and also a rich, multi-layered psychological portrait, using clips from his films and rare interview footage with Buñuel himself to underscore perceptive comments from a wide range of friends, colleagues, actors, relatives, neighbours and a surprising number of priests, vividly illustrating his recurring preoccupations with religion, cruelty, sexuality, dreams, and his love-hate relationship with his native country.

Above all, it's a treasure trove of images and ideas from Buñuel's entire career, including well-chosen extracts from virtually every major feature and plenty of the minor ones - though it had the inevitable side-effect of making me wish they were available on DVD as well! (At the time of writing, the only other Buñuel disc appears to be a French edition of Viridiana, aimed solely at Spanish and French speakers, though Belle de Jour and That Obscure Object of Desire are apparently due out in the UK before too long). My only real complaint is that the subtitles often get film titles wrong, translating them literally rather than supplying the version we're more likely to be familiar with, but this is more jarring than annoying, and it's easy to overcome (the Fritz Lang film at the beginning is Destiny, and you can probably work out the rest).

It's presented in non-anamorphic 1.66:1, not perfectly aligned to fit a widescreen TV's 14:9 zoom mode, but I only had to shave an infinitesimally small sliver off the top to get it to fit: this didn't affect my viewing pleasure at all. Virtually all the interviews are in French or Spanish, and the subtitles are optional. Best of all, Criterion have included 36 chapter stops (almost double the number of the main feature!), which is particularly useful for picking out favourite clips.

This DVD came out at the tail-end of 2000, Buñuel's centenary year, and it's hard to think of a better tribute (apart from a box set of his complete works, of course!). The film is a masterpiece, the transfer is a revelation, and the extras are everything I could have wished for: solid, informative and insightful, and a gratifying absence of exhibitionist filler. Like all the best Criterion DVDs, it's clearly a labour of love - and I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Please note that although there is no indication of region coding anywhere on the package, and despite the fact that many retailers are claiming that these DVDs are not region coded, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is in fact Region 1. I presume there's some contractual reason for this, as it's not Criterion's usual policy - but those with R2-only players should consider themselves warned.]

Michael Brooke