Belle de Jour
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Movie Reviews of Belle de Jour
Movie Review: Great exercise in surrealism, and yes the quality is fine!
Summary: 5 Stars
"Belle de Jour" is generally considered to be director Luis Bunuel's masterpiece; a surprisingly revealing and seemingly personal venture into the world of eroticism and its deviances. It's a truly surrealistic exercise in ambiguity, fantasy, and reality. The line that separates them is blurred so much that the famously mysterious ending has had critics arguing for decades over its meaning.
The fantasy sequences are usually signalled by the sound of carriage bells, but by the end of the film the viewer is no longer able to differentiate between what is another one of Severine's fantasies and what is reality. Even Bunuel admitted to not knowing himself. He said that "by the end, the real and imaginary fuse; for me they form the same thing."
The gorgeous Catherine Deneuve, resplendent in her icy prime, portrays Severine Sevigny, the middle-class wife of Pierre, a doctor. She is frigid, virginal, yet seemingly happy enough in her bourgeoisie life and its trappings. However, upon hearing about a local clandestine brothel from a friend, she pays a visit to the madame, and becomes a prostitute, going by the name of "Belle de Jour", as she can only work in the afternoons. She apparently fully realizes and enjoys her sexuality, despite her guilty conscience, exclaiming that she "can't help it". She certainly doesn't need the money. She's bored with her life and her marriage, needing a "firm hand" to lead her; a need which the madame, Anais, who is obviously attracted to her, almost immediately recognizes. Her sweet and conventional husband is unaware, treating her much like a child, and the audience cannot help but believe that even if he knew of her true nature, he would not understand or empathize. She keeps her two worlds neatly separate until a patron of hers (whom she herself enjoys) becomes obsessed with her, and all is threatened.
That Alfred Hithcock in particular admired this film comes as no surprise to me; Deneuve would have been the perfect Hitchcock heroine: an icy blonde who becomes "a whore in the bedroom", as Hitchock was fond of saying he preferred in his leading ladies. But this remark is not meant to simplfy the story, its telling, or Deneuve's remarkable performance, which is what truly draws the viewer into the film.
"Belle de Jour" was Bunuel's first foray into the use of color, and he employed it to great effect. From the fall colors displayed in the landscape scenes, to the subtle shades in Deneuve's clothing, the contrasts are set. While the world around her explodes in glorious hues, Deneuve's character is defined by her couture, if staid, wardrobe of tan, black, and white.
"Belle de Jour" was unreleased for many years due to copyright problems, but finally re-released in 1995 through the efforts of director Martin Scorcese, and released on DVD in 2003. I've watched it twice in the past week and am still at a loss to describe it very well; suffice to say that I am in awe. It's an amazingly erotic film without any explicitness, and one that I expect hasn't lost any of its effect over the years. As the subject matter is handled very tactfully and without any actual sex scenes; a great deal is left to the viewer's imagination - which only serves the heighten the mysteries inherent at every turn in the film. The viewer is however drawn into the sense of feeling to be a voyeur into Severine's secret life; the careful choreography of scenes and camera angles contribute to the uncomfortable sense of intrusion by us, the viewers.
There are many sub-stories and small mysteries in the film; for instance one of the most widely debated upon by critics is the mystery of "what is in the Asian client's little box?" that he presents first to one prostitute, who quickly refuses, then to Severine, who tentatively agrees. All the audience know is that it's something with a insect-like noise, and when the client leaves, Severine is sprawled face-down upon the bed, the sheets thrown about, and obviously pleased with whatever took place in the interim.
"Belle de Jour" was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, as well as the award for Best Foreign Film in 1968 from the New York Film Critics Circle.
Interesting side notes: Bunuel himself had a shoe fetish, which helps explain the numerous shots of Deneuve's beautifully clad feet throughout the film, and the fact that every time she goes shopping, she buys shoes. He also appears in the film in a cameo as a cafe patron, and in another scene his hands are shown loading a gun.
Movie Review: Revolution by day-dream.
Summary: 5 Stars
'Belle De Jour' opens with a woman being dragged out of a landau by her husband and two coachmen, pushed into a forest, tied to a tree, stripped, viciously whipped and then assaulted. This shocking display of male violence and female submission, implicating characters, director and (desiring male) viewer, will become the film's main theme, but not in the way it first appears. As the film continues, Severine, a frigid, bourgeois wife, will be splattered with excrement, will lie in a coffin to stimulate a role-playing Duke, will work as a prostitute during the day, where she will meet an abusive lover. She shares a name with the heroine of Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus In Furs', that classic text of masochism, the pleasure in being abused. These instances of degradation and humiliation, however, are the perverse means of her liberation. In her perfect bourgeois world, with her perfect, handsome bourgeois husband, their well-appointed apartment, maid, rich friends, tennis clubs, expensive holidays and glamorous clothes, Severine is infantilised, treated like a child. She is cossetted, every desire pandered to until she has no (speakable) desire. She is mostly silent, rejecting that language-trap created for adults. When she visits her husband at work, she is a nuisance to be gently removed.To regain or enact her desire, Severine becomes a prostitute. It is no accident in Bunuel that the worlds of sexuality and of work meet. In debasing her indolent bourgeois self, she finds her true self again. This split between middle-class courtesan and prostitute echoes the other splits in the film, that between mind and body, male and female, dream/fantasy and reality, past and present, city and country. Split, of course, is the wrong word - there are no absolutes in Bunuel, and these opposites meld and reinforce one another - as in a dream, every character, from the maid's child to the madame Anais to the diabolic Husson, is a plausible projection of Severine. Besides the fantasies of debasement and weird sex Severine indulges, are flashbacks to her childhood (or reimaginings of her past?), with incidents of paedophilia and sacrilege, Severine trying, as now, to resist male authority figures manipulating her 'innocence', sexually and socially.
'Belle De Jour' is seen as the opening gambit of Bunuel's celebrated late period, that series of glossy, big-budget, usually French films with big stars. But filming a glossy milieu is not the same as being a glossy film, and 'Belle', with the hard functionality of a Bresson, has the same mix of rigorous detachment, tight concentration and intense subversive subjectivity as Bunuel's best work, in this case surface smoothness being constantly broken down. In that first scene, we watch, without context, violence inflicted on a woman. Through the subsequent film, Severine will learn not only to look for herself (and see things we can't), but also take the power of shaping the film, blurring its boundaries. Catherine Deneuve's intensely private, unyielding performance is the film's soul, with only that famous smirk of satisfaction after the businessman with the unseen toy, tantalising us into answers.
Though primarily a Surrealist social comedy, 'Belle De Jour' is also a Gothic film, from that opening Hammer-horror sequence; to its narrative fractured by dreams; to its interest in double identities, broken bodies and the conflict between desire and duty, sex and spirit, sex and death; to its castles and Sadean figures. But it is also a marvellously funny parody of Godard's 'Breathless' - the gangster sub-plot is announced by a seller barking 'New York Herald Tribune'; concerns a posing young hoodlum agonising over an unattainable woman; hinges on betrayal and a pastiche denouement that out-sillies the original. Godard would repay the favour later that year with his most Bunuellian film, 'Week End'.
Movie Review: Don't listen to the complaints; the quality is FINE
Summary: 5 Stars
First, let's get something straight: Belle de Jour was shot 35 years ago in France. It's just not ever going to look as clean, sharp, and saturated as a newer movie. Director Martin Scorsese (who spearheaded its re-release) is a purist; he would not want to artificially "enhance" the picture at the risk of distorting Luis Bunuel's original vision.Second, this DVD is non-anamorphic for very good reason: Belle de Jour was photographed in 1.66:1 widescreen. 16:9 enhancement would actually have CUT OFF some of the picture at the top and bottom. People who complain about the quality of this DVD simply don't know what they're talking about.
As for the movie itself, Belle de Jour is one of the few films about eroticism that really gets it right - it knows that eroticism is in the mind, not the body. The always luminous Catherine Deneuve plays Severine - a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and fundamentally empty. She is married to a good provider, the handsome but boring Pierre (Jean Sorel), and enjoys all the idle upper-middle class accouterments.
But something is wrong in this greeting-card perfect world. Severine seems to find erotic satisfaction only in the repressed desire to be humilated and used sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and bound to trees. This lurid fantasy life leads her to seek employment as a part-time prostitute - but only during the day, before her husband gets home.
Complications arise when her double life is discovered by her husband's friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), and when she finds herself the subject of a stalker - a dangerously obsessed customer named Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who also happens to be a violence-prone thief.
Though it sounds like fodder for a typical Hollywood "erotic thriller", what develops from these elements is a psychological study that, for all its depths, appears to remain moot about just what makes the main character tick.
Central to the film is Deneuve's work. Under Luis Bunuel's precise, disciplined direction, she delivers a performance that is icy, opaque, and ultimately heartbeaking. Yes, she seems distant, and that is precisely the point: the much talked-about ending, by its very ambiguity, shocks us with the revelation that we've been fooled all along. Severine is not unreadable because she is hiding dark motivations. Rather, she is a dreamy, empty vessel; abused as a child (as we see in subtle flashbacks), and acting out of nothing more than instincts she can neither hope, nor care to understand. The lights are on and nobody's home.
Her last, blissful smile as she enters one of the waking dream-states that pervade the film masks the hollowness of a human being squeezed dry of all her humanity by a life of denial, guilt, and empty materialism.
It's an emotional sucker punch - a romantic banality that underscores with bitter irony what a sad, empty life Severine has, and the great damage that has been done to her. The tremendous harm that her own actions have caused by this point is just a tragic ricochet.
All in all, Belle de Jour is a haunting piece of classic cinema. It may be Bunuel's masterpiece. It belongs in any serious movie fan's collection.
Movie Review: A Classic By Bunuel And Starring Deneuve
Summary: 5 Stars
Severine (Catherine Deneuve) is newly wed to a successful, young, handsome Parisian doctor, Pierre (Jean Sorel). He loves her deeply, but yearns for her to express her love in more sexual ways. Severine is chaste in her marriage, but her fantasy life is vivid and encompassing. She moves from reserve to abandonment in her mind, and we find ourselves involved in her life and her fantasies. She learns of a place where well-to-do, bored young wives play at being prostitutes. She's drawn to the idea and finally begins a hidden life from her husband, but only from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. She becomes Belle de Jour. She finds a need for released sexuality, and for humiliation and masochism. One of her clients is a young, tough hood with steel teeth, a sword cane and brutal manners. She's drawn to him, but who is using whom? She pulls back, and a confrontation may or may not be conclusive. Is it real, or another fantasy?
This is a great Bunuel film, sexual, serious, satirical. It's all about what's going on in Severine's head, and the erotic sexual life she lives. And its about sexual fantasies, most of which appear absurd when looked at. While Severine's story is fascinating, there is much of Bunuel's typical love of fetish at what he shows. The movie opens with Severine and Pierre taking a horse-drawn carriage ride into the country. The bells on the carriage begin to jingle and Pierre stops the carriage and orders the two drivers to pull Severine from the carriage, whip her and rape her. When did the fantasy in Severine's head start? In one scene Pierre and his saturnine friend played by Michel Piccoli are in the country and begin shoveling black, stinking mud into a pail. In the next instance we see Piccoli throwing handsfull of mud onto Severine, tied up and dressed in a virginal white gown. Throughout the movie the sounds of bells tinkling and cats mewing trigger a shift into erotic fantasy for Severine.
Bunuel's satiric look at mankind also shows through clearly. Severine, working afternoons as Belle de Jour, encounters a world famous gynecologist who dresses as a servant so he can be humiliated by a prostitute acting as the lady of the house. There is the large man with something in a small, enameled box that buzzes which makes one of the women say, "No," but which intrigues Severine. We never learn what's in the box. There is the duke who is aroused only when he can play the mourner with a woman pretending to be a corpse in an open casket. It all sounds grotesque, but it's funny, too. And there's not a moment of explicit sex in the film, and only a glimpse of partial nudity.
The movie is almost 40 years old and is still a fascinating look into Severine's life and her fantasies, and probably into ours as well. Deneuve is what makes the movie work. She may appear at first to be a perfectly groomed ice queen, but before long you know that a great deal is happening behind that face. Like Isabelle Huppert, she can imply serious, unsettling emotions just by looking calm.
The DVD picture is just fine; there's nothing wrong with it or the audio.
Movie Review: Immersion in Fantasy & the Consequences
Summary: 5 Stars
All the best elements of Bunuel's style come together in "Belle de Jour". This film remains dreamily surreal without becoming absurd and comical--although done with humour, this is a serious film with strong characters as well as concepts. This is also an autumn and winter film, and the use of these two seasons as background contributes to the ambience of peripheral darkness. "Belle de Jour" opens with the jingling bells of a horse and carriage--an effect that recurs throughout the film. The carriage serves as both a literal and metaphorical "transport to fantasy". In "Belle de Jour" we are introduced to Severine's fantasies barely after being introduced to her. We eventually see that Severine lives through these fantasies, in which she becomes the masochist and seeming victim in an erotic context--Severine "likes it rough". This relieves the tedium of her existence as the doctor's wife. Her husband, "the boy next door" is decent and caring, but lacks the visceral fire of Severine's partners--imagined or otherwise. In real life, Severine is well-adjusted and yet possibly traumatized--and so she surrenders to a life of fantasy. In Madame Anaïs' bordello, Severine as Belle emanates "high class" as an escort while her colleagues are mere working girls beneath her station. The other girls love her clothes, and yet are envious of this mysterious woman of means who has stepped into their lives.
There is an ongoing reference to cats in this film--we hear them yowling in the background for a few moments in several of Severine's fantasy sequences. The aristocrat who hires Belle to come to his chateau speaks of the "soleil noir" of autumn. The scene he plays out with Belle is a mingling of sex and death, although the details of exactly how his fetish manifests remains vague--the more to spark curiousity in the viewer's imagination. After this encounter, Belle is disposed of by the butler of this man of wealth and taste--she is kicked out of the chateau as if she were a common street whore. Two-thirds of the way though "Belle de Jour" we are introduced to Marcel, a violent criminal and client of Madame Anaïs who becomes obsessed with Belle/Severine. Paradoxically, it is with Marcel that Belle is able to be vulnerable, admitting to him that she is "lost". As opposed to her relationship with Pierre--as Severine--with whom she is loving and affectionate, and yet necessarily secretive. Ultimately, Severine pays the price for playing with the fire that is Marcel. There is a key moment of foreshadowing when Pierre see an empty wheelchair on the street--he has seen his fate. A highlight of the film is Genevieve Page's portrayal of Madame Anaïs--Ms. Page gives a sensitive, nuanced performance of a woman with many sides--gentle, tough, sweet, fierce, no-nonsense, playful, decent. Of all the characters in this film, hers is the most transparent, and the most likable.
Stephen C. Bird, author of "Hideous Exuberance: A Satire"