Belle de Jour
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Movie Reviews of Belle de Jour
Movie Review: Belle de Jour indeed!
Summary: 4 Stars
Luis Bunuel's classic "Belle de Jour" must have been enormously, outrageously shocking to audiences when it debuted in the late 1960s. It may well continue to shock today, although for completely different reasons. At the time, I suspect people objected to the idea that a woman would not only fantasize about debasing herself, but also actually act upon these desires. Now, the outrage would involve the concept that a woman would choose to do such a thing at all. Why, feminists would say today, when a woman can chose so many different outlets would she decide to subordinate herself to men? In a world highly charged with feminist influences, the story about a woman who attains sexual arousal only when strange men treat her like garbage would cause the most strident libber to cough and sputter with rage. Whatever the case, Bunuel's film is an interesting one to watch. I still cannot say whether I enjoyed it or not. My girlfriend, no frothing at the mouth feminist, found the film extremely tiresome. She almost fell asleep several times, and urged me to turn it off. Not a ringing endorsement, to be sure, but there are intriguing elements to the film well worth looking for if you try hard enough.Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) lives a posh existence. Her husband, a wealthy, busy doctor, is willing to buy his wife anything she desires. He even likes spending time with her on occasion, but he treats her like a child. It is obvious Severine finds her spouse boring in ways both sexual and emotional. As an outlet for her boredom, Serizy imagines elaborate fantasies involving whippings, rapes, and being splattered with mud. Why? Because Severine doesn't have the nerve to do something about her growing ennui. Life goes on as it always has until our heroine cannot stand it anymore. She finally goes into town and signs on as help at a local brothel, agreeing to turn up a few afternoons a week for several hours of degradation and debasement. It takes forever for Severine to fully engage her clients because she continually hesitates to follow through on her fantasies. After meeting with her first client, which turns out to be a total disaster, she stays away from the brothel for a few days. The fantasies and boredom of married life drive her back, however, and she soon racks up a list of clients who favor this emotionally frigid yet beautiful woman.
Problems emerge when Severine enchants a violent thug named Marcel. Here's a customer Serizy can appreciate, a brutish lout who will fulfill her violent desires. Unfortunately, Marcel also has his own desires, namely obtaining Severine on a permanent basis. This won't work at all since Serizy never wishes to abandon her easy life with her wealthy husband. The criminal is not to be deterred as he stalks Severine and eventually discovers where she lives. A violent act committed against her husband, an act that leaves the man permanently scarred, leads to a sort of rapprochement at the end of the film between man and wife. At least I think it does. You're never exactly sure what is going on here because the director's use of surrealism blends reality with Severine's outrageous fantasies. The movie's moving along at a nice clip, you're following the plot, and suddenly there is a scene with Severine doing something naughty under a table. Huh? The mix of wild nonsense with conventional scenes isn't as bad as it sounds, though. In fact, it's often funny.
"Belle de Jour" is the sort of film that necessitates multiple viewings. There is just too much going on here to absorb in a single sitting. I am not sure whether Bunuel was a communist or not, but I suspect the film is an artfully constructed attack on the European bourgeoisie. The director uses Severine as a symbol of upper class decadence, as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the wealthy. Here's a woman who seemingly has it all and yet she cannot find satisfaction in her life. Heck, she's only been married to her husband for a year and already she's looking for new thrills, new acquisitions. On the other hand, Marcel is your typical proletariat, a common man who is secure in his identity and in his desires. He should have spent his time attempting to destroy the bourgeois Severine instead of bedding her. As it is, his attempt to possess her leads to his destruction. Whatever this movie ultimately means-and there are plenty of interpretations out there awaiting your attention-Catherine Deneuve is amazing to watch in the role of Severine. She's a beautiful woman, and it's quite something to watch a woman who looks this good engage in these sorts of activities. The mud scene alone is worth the price of the film.
The DVD is a mixed bag. The picture quality is awful considering how prized this film is to millions of cinema fans. I've seen the arguments about retaining the "purity" of Bunuel's best-known film, but the grain, streaks, and general haphazardness of the presentation made me wonder why a Criterion treatment for "Belle de Jour" isn't in the works. What would the film really lose if the techies made a once over on the negative? At least the transfer is in widescreen, with a commentary by a Bunuel student and some trailers thrown in for good measure. When it comes right down to it, I would watch "Belle de Jour" again. It's a movie interesting enough to merit subsequent viewings if for no other reason than to try and get to the bottom of just what Bunuel was trying to say.
Movie Review: An unbalance look at female sexual perversion.
Summary: 4 Stars
Belle de Jour most definitely belongs to the realm of cinematic classics. It is arguably the most accessible of Bunuel's films and probably the best introduction to his work because it did for me.
Séverine (Deneuve) has everything a young middle class woman is supposed to want. She has a handsome, caring doctor for a husband named Pierre (Sorel), a beautiful home, and plenty of fashionable clothing. But she is not happy. Her bland spouse treats her like a child, so she indulges in dark brutal fantasies filled with guilt, passion, and pain. Already inclined to sadomasochistic fantasies due to some unknown trauma in her past, Severine is increasingly drawn to acting upon her need for degradation. Bored with her life, she works during the afternoons at a brothel which caters to this proclivity, yet she is still the good bourgeois wife who informs her madam that she has to be home by five p.m. (her alias at the brothel is Belle de Jour, a pun on the French euphemism for prostitute, "belle de nuit"). She enjoys this double life until one of her customers, a gangster, becomes so obsessed with her to the point that he is determined to kill her husband. What follows next is a meditation on ambiguity on all levels. Severine is morally torn between living as an upper-class ice maiden and an abandoned fantasy woman. Although Severine is trying to stop her husband's murder, her efforts seem to be somewhat half-hearted, almost as if she is willing to tempt fate.
Thanks to Sacha Vierny's stunning color cinematography, Yves Saint Laurent's couture and her own genes, Deneuve herself looks beautiful that even she seems unreal an indication of how beautiful Deneuve is in this film can be found by recalling Grace Kelly in her Hitchcock period. Finally, the narrative structure is strained by events to the point where the audience cannot be certain whether anything recounted in the course of the film belongs to the realm of the physical or the psychological -- not unlike life itself, at times.
Towards the end of this film you'll come to fine out that Severine likes molestation. That is the heart of her perversity and the film's. It absolutely refuses to help us be good bourgeois. Bunuel's naturalistic style was subversive and sadistic. Its pitiless anti-aestheticism means you watch without painkillers. No ambivalence, no softening, no way out. Either you respond from your own perversity, or you check your watch.
Movie Review: Catherine Deneuve at the height of her powers.
Summary: 4 Stars
Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)
Ah, Luis Bunuel, you never disappoint me. While I'm still looking for the Bunuel movie that I will like better than La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, there's no denying it's a fun search. This one features Catherine Deneuve at the height of her seductive powers, the frigid housewife who finds herself drawn to the idea of working afternoons as a prostitute thanks to her incessant fantasies. Things get ugly when one of her clients becomes obsessed and threatens to expose her double life.
While it has been said many times, it bears repeating: despite the fact that the entire cast shines in this movie, they all somehow manage to be eclipsed by Deneuve. Even if it wasn't (and, really, none of us has any way of knowing), Deneuve makes it seem like this was the role she was born to play. Were the film not already brilliant, she'd carry it. And yet it is brilliant, though likely a bit confusing your first time around (this, one would assume, is by design). Not that it's hard to follow, but Belle slips in and out of fantasy in the movie with no warning. Following the twists and turns of her mind could well give you a concussion. But that's part of the fun.
From any other director, I'd probably give this five stars. But, since it's Bunuel, I not only have to stack it up against the rest of the films I've seen this year, but against Bunuel's body of work as well. And really, there are very few films made by anyone capable of standing up with La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie and not having to look away first. This is not, of course, to say Belle de Jour is not better than 99.9% of the movies you will see this year. So go get it. Now. **** ½
Movie Review: Once again Bunuel skewers the bourgeoisie
Summary: 4 Stars
There are some very perceptive reviews of this film already posted, so I will mostly just comment on aspects they don't emphasize. First and foremost is the master's interest in class issues. Although sexual obsession may be the foreground theme here, the shallow, petty, and ultimately self-defeating behavior of the upper middle class is never totally absent as a background theme. Aside from Severine's own vapid behavior, which she pursues heedless of the possible consequences, her husband and his "friend" Husson are depicted as an ineffectual man and a malicious one, whose individual actions (or lack thereof) contribute to Severine's predicament.The screenplay is also quite amusing at times, and I think this further indicates Bunuel's satirical intent. Severine's early fantasies are really classic schoolgirl daydreams (well, OK, this schoolgirl may have read de Sade) and it's hard not to giggle at the sight of elaborately costumed coachmen whipping our heroine while hubby, striking a Bogart-like pose, lights a cigarette (he does this a lot). There are a number of other such moments. Even Deneuve's succession of stunning Yves St. Laurent outfits can be read as a satire of the typical commercial movie's obsession with surface glamor. The very sheen of Bunuel's imagery takes us further inside the worldview of his protagonist.
I, too, hope this film ultimately gets a better transfer to DVD. In the outdoor scenes, the fading and color shift (green to blue) are especially noticeable. Was there no better print to work from? Please, Criterion, consider restoring this. That's the only reason it gets four stars instead of five. Still worth having, of course!
Movie Review: The gap between fantasy and reality in female desire...
Summary: 4 Stars
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...