Belle de jour

Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is a bored, affluent housewife. We meet her first when she is forced to dismount from a carriage. Her husband Pierre ties her to a tree, whips her, then leaves her to be raped by the two carriage drivers.

Séverine is prone to fantasies. She is in a conventional marriage. Pierre is a handsome young surgeon. They sleep in separate beds. An older friend, Henri, keeps hitting on her, but she tells him to keep his compliments for himself. He is attracted by her blonde perfection, her virtue and her icy disdain.

Taking fantasy a stage further, Séverine gets a daytime job at a high class brothel. At first she is prudish and wants to pick her clients. Then she is shown 'a firm hand' - which the masochistic side of her nature relishes.

Re-released almost forty years after its original cinema exhibition, Belle de Jour still has the power to shock. Not through explicit nudity (it is a highly erotic work without being titillating) but by the shocking images, and the superb performances that contrast the aloofness of the bourgeoisie to the practicality of sex, of elegance to depravity. Scenes of Séverine having mud thrown at her stick in the mind no less than the tentativeness with which she approaches the brothel for the first time, dressed in black, and ready to take flight at any moment. Couture by Yves Saint Laurent and lush photography drown us in luxurious chic. The stylish settings arouse our aesthetic senses, and the languorous pacing and emotional complexity keep us trying to figure it all out long before we realise just how difficult that is going to be.

Analysing it in Freudian or purely sexual terms is less than satisfying. The characters are convincing - the posh conservative elite, the matter-of-fact but certainly not coarse madame, the pervs who visit the brothel, and the psychologically conflicted Séverine through them all. It is hardly a plea for sexual liberation - the men, even one that Séverine takes a fancy to, are pretty lowlife. Their strange fantasy requirements mete out the most fascinating tableau of perversions but even more fascinating is what we don't see: such as what is in the box brought by the Chinaman. We are forced to identify with Séverine - she is the most normal character - and yet the most convincing way to approach the film is one suggested by Buñuel himself, as a parable attacking the decadence of the bourgeoisie.

On a more elevated level, it is a forceful artistic statement that viewers addicted to linear storytelling may find hard to accept. It seems to anticipate Eyes Wide Shut in its treatment of hidden sexuality, but cinematically it is more linked to the surreal Mulholland Drive. Buñuel's friend from University and at one point collaborator, Salvador Dali, could be similarly perplexing when it came to alternate realities. He said, "People love mystery, and that is why they love my paintings." The mind is drawn to interpret a piece of art in a specific concrete way, but the artist may wish to express a concept that transcends specific examples. In Belle de Jour, Buñuel claims that there are not two endings, just one ambiguous ending. When you have finished watching the film it is not hard to decide which scenes are reality and which are fantasy, but when you run it through your mind again it is equally possible to make alterations. Do we want to know what is in the box, or do we love the mystery?

The name Belle de Jour can be read as a pun on 'lady of the night', since Séverine only worked in the day; everything becomes plain. This is maybe why it becomes her as her name at the brothel. But enter Séverine's feverish imagination and you might see something else.

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

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.

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

The always provocative Luis Buñuel directed (and co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière) this adaptation of Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, about the beautiful, apparently frigid 23 year-old wife (Catherine Deneuve) of a surgeon (Jean Sorel) who decides to live her fantasies at a brothel in the afternoons.

Here, as in several of his films, Buñuel makes a sharp, often disturbing, sometimes darkly funny, and always provocative meditation on the lifelessness of the French bourgeoisie, focusing on the boredom and private rebellion of a young woman so absorbed in her own fantasies that we don't know if what we are seeing is actually happening or only taking place in Severine's mind. Deneuve, gorgeous as ever, flawlessly plays Severine with a cold distance which is nothing short of intriguing. A character which could have easily been turned into a caricature, Deneuve makes Severine come alive in flesh and quiet desperation.

Although more discreetly than in some of his other films, here Buñuel also criticizes - with symbols, allegories, some subtler than others - the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church as an institution. His hand of surrealism, social and religious provocation make for a film that, over four decades after its release, remains strange, somewhat disturbing, and energetic. Severine is not a heroine or an activist for anything, but her rebellion is about her own deathly bourgeois condition. Prostitution here is never glamorized (even though, unlike the other prostitutes in the film, Severine is not doing it for the money - she doesn't need it); the clients are hideous-looking, quite often creepy and violent. Severine needs an escape from her suffocating life, and in her fantasies, the rougher, the better. If being a rebel is defying some sort of establishment (for whatever reason), then Severine is definitely a rebel figure; she defied not only society's moral grounds of decency (albeit slyly), but also her own inner demons. The answers to whether Severine's rebellion was worth anything is for the spectator to decide - and there lies the richness of Buñuel's surrealist creation. 10/10.