Belle de Jour

Luis Buñuel, France, 1967, 100 minutes

It's perhaps convenient - if necessarily reductive - to divide Luis Bunuel's 50-year film-making career into three periods: the "passionate calls to murder" of the late 1920s and early 1930s Surrealist exercises; the under-rated and under-explored Mexican films of the 1940 and 1950s; and the more overtly refined "mature" films of the 1960s and 70s, of which this is perhaps the best known example.

Adapted from Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel but updated to the 1967 present, it is the story of Severine Serizy, a beautiful young Parisian bourgeois housewife, whose sexual repression leads her to take a job in Madame Anais's brothel. Only being able to be there in the afternoon while her husband, Pierre is at work, she takes the name Belle de Jour. Each evening she then returns home, before he \ can become aware of her absence.

Things become doubly complicated when Pierre's friend Henri Husson discovers Severine's new occupation and when Severine becomes involved with one of her clients, a young gangster by the name of Marcel.

Exquisitely written, performed and directed and providing stimulation for both mind and body - "the most important erotic organ is the brain," indeed; students of psychoanalysis and erotic literature in particular will find much of interest - countless words have been invested in trying to explain exactly what it is about Belle De Jour that makes it so fascinating, so wonderful. Is it Catherine Deneuve, never better than she was here, with the possible exception of her next collaboration with Bunuel, Tristana? The support from Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page and Pierre Clementi, uniformly so right in their respective roles? The way Bunuel so brilliantly blurs and ultimately renders meaningless boundaries between fantastical and real states though his deceptively simple treatment of everything with that same ostensibly objective, "degree zero" mise-en-scene? The subtle touches, like the Capra-esque use of bells as a recurring motif?

Ultimately, of course, it's truly impossible to say; the very hallmark of the sublime and the reason that the film is so endlessly watchable. So, paralleling Bunuel's beautifully paradoxical "still an atheist, thank god" can we suggest that you "see it again for the first time" ?

Review by Michel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2007

Buñuel's film is an adaptation of a novel by Joseph Kessel. It concerns Severine (Catherine Deneuve), the beautiful and bored wife of a surgeon. Tiring of her mundane bourgeois life, she takes a day job at a high-class brothel (one of those institutions peculiar to fictional cinema) where she meets a bizarre sequence of men whose weird fantasies she is employed to enact The film's conceit, however, is that we never know for sure what is real and what, like Severine's submissive fantasies is merely imagined. Buñuel plays with the viewer's perceptions, keeping him/her fascinated and beguiled by the films twists and turns.

Despite the nature of the plot Belle de Jour is surprisingly chaste and can in no way be described as mere sexploitation, yet its sheer force and sexually charged atmosphere is such that it has been described as "like being buried alive in Sandra Bernhardt's dressing room".

Ever the ice-maiden, Catherine Deneuve appears absolutely at home in Buñuel's coolly co-ordinated and restrained handling of such a potentially inflamatory subject.

Review by Iain Lang
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96