Belle de jour

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.

'Belle De Jour' is a movie which requires multiple viewing to fully appreciate. We live in an era of explicit sex and violence in movies are commonplace, and where we are very rarely required to think. 'Belle De Jour' is not like this. What you don't see is more important than what you do. It is a movie which needs a little effort on the viewers part. Persevere, you will be rewarded.

The basic plot is easy to understand. Severine (Catherine Deneuve in a superbly understated performance) is a beautiful, sexually repressed young bride. Her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) adores her, but their marriage remains chaste. Severine suffers from dreams and hallucinations of debasement. She eventually is employed in a brothel during the day under a pseudonym, while continuing to live a bourgeois life with her unsuspecting husband. I won't reveal what happens after that.

That is the bare bones of the story, but it gives you no idea of HOW Bunuel tells it, which is what makes 'Belle De Jour' such a gem. I think this movie is one of the landmarks of 1960s cinema, and has aged wonderfully. In fact it gets better and better as most contemporary movies about sex get poorer and poorer. A movie that will haunt you. Superb!

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.

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