Belle de jour (1967) - film review

Although she is loved by her husband Pierre, Séverine Serizy cannot bring herself to have a physical relationship with him.  As their cosy middleclass marriage remains unconsummated, Séverine is troubled by masochistic fantasies in which she is raped, beaten and abused.  Prompted by one of Pierre’s friends, Henri Husson, Séverine offers her services at a Parisian brothel run by Madame Anais.  Because she can only work from two to five o’clock, she is given the pseudonym Belle de jour.  After an uncomfortable beginning, Séverine soon finds the work of a prostitute liberating and she begins to feel that at last she is a fulfilled woman.  But Séverine’s new lease of life is threatened when one of her clients, a violent young gangster named Marcel, becomes obsessively possessive of her...

Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1967, Belle de jour is Luis Buñuel’s best-known and most highly acclaimed film, an erotic masterpiece that is still to be found highly placed in the more discriminating film polls.  It is widely considered to be Buñuel’s most accessible work, although its seamless blend of reality and fantasy makes it a profoundly complex and ambiguous study in desire.  Belle de jour is significant in that it was the first film to explore female eroticism, that mysterious avenue of human experience which Sigmund Freud referred to as the Dark Continent.  Compelling and masterfully composed, it remains one of cinema’s most potent and incisive explorations of female sexuality.  

Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel Belle de jour provided director Luis Buñuel and his screenwriter associate Jean-Claude Carrière with the perfect springboard for a darkly comedic study in sexual repression.  The film combines Buñuel’s former interest in Freudian psychoanalytic theory with his mocking dislike for bourgeois sensibility.  In a similar vein to the director’s later film Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Belle de jour explores the perils and pitfalls of thwarted desire within a rigid bourgeois context, a milieu in which one’s sexual instinct is constantly frustrated by materialistic concerns and a deeply ingrained compunction to comply with the demands of social etiquette.

There are some striking similarities between Belle de jour and Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1956).  In both films, the central female protagonist is a woman who is tragically stuck in a middleclass groove, from which she obtains temporary escape through an improbable sexual awakening.  In the end, the heroine is confronted with a dilemma - she must choose between desire and status, either to give up her life of wild abandon or else to forego her place in society.  Buñuel, predictably, opts for the pessimistic (and more realistic) ending, and so Séverine’s attempts to evade the straitjacket of bourgeois conformity end in dismal failure.  The only escape she has is into the realm of the imagination, where she can indulge her wildest fantasies whilst still appearing to be a model of middleclass respectability.  

By presenting his heroine’s fantasies as realistically as her everyday experiences, Buñuel makes no distinction between what is real and what is not.  This is a feature of Buñuel’s cinema and is a hangover from his early association with surrealist art – the subjective viewpoint that characterises his films refuses to recognise the boundary between reality and fantasy.  What the film shows is a set of experiences from the perspective of one character which may be entirely real, partly real, or entirely the product of her imagination.  At the start, we may think we can delineate between what is real and what is not, by dint of the fact that, in real life, husbands generally do not allow their wives to be tied to a tree, stripped and horsewhipped.  However, when the film has run its course, this smug certainty has all but evaporated, since reality and fantasy have somehow become indistinguishable.  As the film loops back to its beginning after a bewildering coda, we are almost forced to conclude that the whole thing has been a dream.  

There are certainly enough hints to substantiate the view that the events depicted take place entirely within the confines of a dream.  Pierre’s precognition of his paralysis is one such pointer, but what is perhaps more revealing is the similarity between Marcel, the hot bit of rough who takes to Séverine like a wasp to a jam sandwich, and the coachman who rapes her at the start of the film.  Both Marcel and the coachman are stereotypes of coarse masculinity, easily recognised as the products of a wish fulfilment fantasy.  The dream sequence which opens the film is repeated, in a more realistic but equally fanciful vein, in what follows, as Séverine sets out to fulfil her desire, which is to be totally subjugated by the dominant male.  Inevitably, this quasi-real fantasy runs away with itself when Marcel proves to be too assertive and finds his way out of the time box Séverine has allotted for him.  Séverine’s desire to be dominated exceeds her ability to control it and so the fantasy must end, in the grotesquely spectacular fashion of a male orgasm, so that another may begin in its place.  And so the dream, if that is what it is, continues, ad infinitum.

The casting of Catherine Deneuve as Séverine is a marvellous example of serendipity.  At the time, she was in a relationship with the film director François Truffaut, who was so impressed with her acting skill that he lobbied Buñuel to give her a lead role in his next film.  Buñuel was initially lukewarm towards Deneuve and insisted that she should not give a performance.  Ever the professional, Deneuve obliged and delivered a non-performance par excellence that is perfectly suited for the film.  It is the actress’s ice-cold aloofness and the tight grip she has on her emotions that makes her so perfect for the role of Séverine.  When we first meet Séverine in her normal life (not the dream fantasy), she is as cold and expressionless as a dressmaker’s dummy, her face a mask of statue-like impassivity.  It is only when she has begun work as a prostitute that she appears to come to life and shows the first glimmerings of emotion.  Deneuve’s performance in Belle de jour is among her finest, a master-class in subtlety that takes the spectator by surprise every time.  Watching Deneuve in this film is like watching the walls of a seemingly impregnable dam slowly fracture.  The crack is barely perceptible at first, but we are transfixed as it grows, caught in the spell of a morbid anticipation of the cataclysm that is to come.

It is hard to pinpoint precisely why Belle de jour has had such an impact.  It is not Buñuel’s most technically perfect film, nor is it his most inspired.  Perhaps the film’s perplexing ambiguity is the key to its appeal.  The film is an enigma, a paradox, like the mysterious buzzing box that Séverine  is offered by her Japanese customer and which remains to this day a subject of endless debate.  Belle de jour is like a dream that compels us to look for meaning within it, as though it somehow has the power to shed light on our own identity and the mysteries of our desires.  But it is not the dream itself that will enlighten us, but rather the process by which we attempt to interpret it.  The main purpose of art is to help us to understand ourselves a little better, and Buñuel’s film does that, with knobs on.

© James Travers 2010

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