Belle de Jour

Sèverine is perfect, she's Catherine Deneuve. She consciously inhabits her subconscious and the comings and goings are tinted with pristine, erotic decadence. Her perfection includes outrage without rage, panic without fear. Having or not having is the question she never asks. Her husband Pierre, the exquisite Jean Sorel, is like one of her garments. There, stunning, understated, reliable, existing without existing. Marcel, in the other hand, the riveting Pierre Clementi, seems determined to provoke. Provoke what? Where is that need creeping from? I love to meander through "Belle de Jour" allowing Luis Bunuel to have his fun. He deserves it. His puzzle is just that, a puzzle and his genius, challenge us to find the non existent pieces. The pieces are ours coming from our own wishes, wantings and longings.

While you're happy in your marriage you're not fulfilled, spend most days dreaming of how you might become thrilled, usually involving pain, along with force while you're restrained, at the hands of one or more, who are strong willed. A conversation means you make enquiry, and Madame Anais takes you on, as a payee, for services professional, private and discretional, just as long as you can stop in time for tea (about 5pm).

But of course things invariably go awry and your pleasures are curtailed but you still have your fantasy and imagination. Another great Catherine Deneuve performance that, if nothing else, shows just how conservative the world was compared with today.

Catherine Deneuve is perfectly cast as an upper-class Parisian housewife who decides to spend her afternoons working in a brothel in Luis Bunuel's subversive masterpiece which proves that intimation can be just as effective as exploitation. Just about everything here--especially the shocking conclusion--is open to interpretation, from impulse to rationalization, and it's to Bunuel's genius that he is able to stand back, letting his audience fill in the gaps in their imagination and, if necessary, implicate themselves. And in Deneuve, Bunuel has found a brilliant blank canvas for the audience to express themselves upon; never fully clear on her motivations (though some tantalizing flashbacks offer hints), she alternates between classic French coldness and classic French passion and though she's intentionally unreachable, she's always fully aware of how to manipulate the spell she's cast over you. A great example of a master of cinema in deep collaboration with a master actress--their exploration of the female psyche runs the gamut of every possible emotion while never being crass or lowering themselves to merely reducing and simplifying.

Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, a bored middle-class woman who never slept with her handsome husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). She eventually adopts a double life on weekday afternoons as a hooker… Here she explores the depths of her desires with her amazing sexual inhibitions… Although the film resolves around her goings-on at a high-class brothel, real nudity and sex are never shown…

"Belle de Jour" may seem one of the most mysterious, poetic, and provoking films ever made… Producing a body of work unparalleled in its wealth of meaning and its ability to surprise and shock, Buñuel leads us into a new world arousing wonder and astonishment, depravity and pleasure, weird and entertaining

The premise of BELLE DU JOUR is well known. A young, beautiful, and slightly frigid doctor's wife (Catherine Deneuve) secretly harbors fantasies of being dominated, humiliated, and abused by her husband (Jean Sorel.) When these fantasies can no longer be denied, she becomes a prostitute under the sponsorship of a possibly lesbian madam (Geneviève Page), working during the afternoons while her husband is at his own work. Her sexuality is awakened by the sometimes brutish clients, who soon discover that "she likes it rough," and she is ultimately caught up a relationship with a truly dangerous client (Pierre Clémenti) whose possessiveness threatens to destroy both her and her husband.

Throughout the film Deneuve slips in and out of memory and fantasy, sometimes recalling herself as a possibly molested child, sometimes imagining herself as the victim in a series of sexual assault fantasies. Director Bunuel, whose masterpiece this is, so blurs the line between memory, reality, and fantasy that by the film's conclusion one cannot be sure if some, most, or everything about the film has been Deneuve's fantasy.

Although it includes a number of impressive performances (particularly by Geneviève Page, her girls, and their clients), BELLE is essentially Deneuve's film from start to finish, and she gives an astonishing performance that cannot be easily described. Like the film itself, it is a balancing act between fantasy and a plausible reality that may actually be nothing of the kind. Bunuel presents both her and the film as a whole in an almost clinical manner, and is less interested in gaining our sympathy for the character than in presenting her as an object for intellectual observation.

Ultimately, BELLE DU JOUR seems to be about a lot of things, some of them obvious and some of them extremely subtle. And yet, given the way in which it undercuts its realities by blurring them with fantasy, it is also entirely possible that the film is not actually "about" anything except itself. Individuals who insist on clear-cut meanings and neatly wrapped conclusions will probably loathe it--but those prepared to accept the film on its own terms will find it a fascinating experience. Recommended.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer