Belle de Jour (no 10)

by Allan Fish

(France/Italy/Spain 1967 101m) DVD1/2

Only in the afternoons

p  Robert Hakim, Raymond Hakim  d  Luis Buñuel  w  Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière  novel  Joseph Kessel  ph  Sacha Vierny  ed  Louisette Hautecoeur, Walyer Spohr  art  Robert Clavel  cos  Yves Saint-Laurent

Catherine Deneuve (Sevèrine Serizy), Jean Sorel (Pierre Serizy), Michel Piccoli (Henri Husson), Geneviève Page (Madame Anais), Françoise Fabian (Charlotte), Pierre Clementi (Marcel), Francisco Rabal (Hippolyte),

A horse and carriage move towards the camera through a row of autumnal trees.  A man talks to his wife, but suddenly he orders the carriage stopped and roughly drags his wife from the carriage.  He then orders his two coachmen to take her into the woods, where they tie her to a rope hanging from a tree.  Tearing the back off her dress and unfastening her bra, they begin to whip her, until the man orders them to stop and tells them that they can have their way with her.  From this Sade-like beginning we cut to the same woman sitting upright in bed awaiting her husband.

            Never was there a more ambiguous beginning to any film, quite appropriately for cinema’s premier professor of ambiguity.  Belle de Jour may detail the escapades of a sexually cold young woman, but Buñuel’s film dares to remain lukewarm, its passions below the surface.  The story goes on to follow the woman, Sevèrine, as she overcomes her frigidity and boredom by taking a day job at a brothel, that of the splendidly named Madame Anais.  Yet what the film is really about is open to question.  To some it’s merely a Buñuelian exercise in games playing, with Deneuve as both the prize and the contestant.  To others it’s an attack on bourgeois values and the rather unforgivable boredom of their class.  While to some it’s a representation of the erotic nature of one’s daydreams and darkest fantasies.  To equally as many it may be about the subservience of women.  One might also add a dissection of the Hitchcockian blonde that Deneuve represented, if never actually became.  In truth no interpretation is more or less valid than the other, and it’s that ambiguity that stays with you.  It’s an erotic film, but ne’er a nipple or a bottom is shown (unless under the black sheer robe Deneuve wears for a bizarre ceremony).  It plays with the audience, Deneuve seemingly remaining chaste to them as we never actually see her make love, only the preparations for and the aftermath to (most memorably her truly shagged out appearance after a visit from a Chinaman of strange habits who also seems to want the teenage schoolgirl niece of the proprietress).  She truly does lead a double life, both to the audience and her husband, in a way looking forward to his later That Obscure Object of Desire (where two women played the chaste and carnal side to the same woman) yet remaining very independent of his later oeuvre. 

            In short Belle is a gorgeous erotic tapestry of a movie, so finely weaved that one scene removed or rendered differently would cause the whole work to come apart.  It’s as stylised as the clothes worn in the film; the epitome of sixties chic, from the skiing sweaters and Deneuve’s short tennis skirt to the knee length skirts and final outfit, like a maid without an apron, symbolising her final submission to her master/husband.  It’s a film that is not afraid to show that though Piccoli may be largely right when he observed that most women enter prostitution for the money, that it isn’t a cast iron rule.  Deneuve enters it to give spark to her life, to liberate herself while contrastingly enslaving herself.  It’s this willingness to surprise you that makes it a truly great Buñuel film, rather than just a merely important film.  Well, that and the gorgeous photography of Sacha Vierny – relishing those autumnal exteriors – and the exquisite performances.  Page as the brothel proprietress, Piccoli as the perverted sophisticate and Fabian as a sexy whore are memorable, but Deneuve is legendary, her performance both the epitome and the antithesis (there’s ambiguity for you) of her heroine in Repulsion.  “There’s nothing as beautiful as the autumn sun” we are told; nothing that is except for a woman as ravishing and mysterious as Deneuve at her absolute zenith.

Advertisement