Sometime during the making of Belle de Jour – whether during the scripting with Jean-Claude Carrière or filming in Paris in 1967 – Luis Buñuel must have realized he was directing a movie about an erotic subject, not an object. Yet the dirty old man made a comedy anyway. If comedy has often required things – good, bad, or otherwise – happening to people, then the heroine of Belle de Jour subverts this truism. From the queasy first frame to the chilling last, Catherine Deneuve’s Séverine Serizy is in charge of her destiny.
In Deneuve, the Spanish director who was often at best indifferent to acting (also a middle finger to our pieties about the importance of acting), found a camera presence whose magazine-glossy beauty tempered a self-aware deadpan coolness. Maybe it was the other way around. That was the point. Belle de Jour is the story of housewife Séverine, who has fantasies about working in a brothel while her doe-eyed doctor husband quietly seethes over her reluctance to have sex with him; she also fantasizes about being tied up, soiled with mud, and beaten by menials. The economy of motion and absence of sentimentality – a harshness almost – of Buñuel’s compositions, plus Deneuve’s reserve, are devoid of prurience. David Cronenberg and Michael Haneke took notes as young filmmakers.
Based on a Joseph Kessel novel that Buñuel considered too hokey, Belle de Jour only went into production at the insistence of the Hakim Brothers yet few of its melodramatic elements remain (working on Z-grade projects in Mexico for most of the fifties stripped Buñuel of any interest in melodrama anyway). What is on screen is a convergence of reality and fantasy so seamless that for non-French speakers the italicized subtitles are at times the only indication that Buñuel has switched from one to the other. A few years from budgets so dismal that The Exterminating Angel the actors wore paper ties at a scene set at a formal dinner, Buñuel finally had money for production design, or, more accurately, he had production design. The efforts show in Belle de Jour: much of the film’s examination of surfaces depends on the comfort of actors moving in interior spaces as different as the rococo way in which furniture and ornaments are presented in the kind of apartment a young doctor would consider chic (a perfume bottle as heavy and ornate as a gem for a queen falls on tile in one of the film’s first scenes) and the rumpled middle-class warmth of Madame Anaïs’ brothel (About Buñuel’s purported disinterest in acting: Geneviève Page as Anaïs gives a performance of poised wounded pride). I’m not sure Buñuel and Carrière knew how to end their picture without relapsing to melodrama; the director in essence threw up his hands. “I have various solutions and I can’t decide on any one of them,” Buñuel told Mexican critics Jose de la Colina an Tomas Perez Turrant in Objects of Desire.
What I would love in 2018 is a feminist reading of Belle de Jour, disassembling fifty years of received wisdom about sexiness and women’s bodies and the presentation of feminine sexuality. Based on my most recent reviewing, Séverine keeps her agency within this circumscribed world in she’s allowed to move (emphasis mine). While the vividness of her private erotic life adduces her liberty, I wonder to what extent those images of domination and brutality are male fantasies created by a male novelist and male scenarists. The insistence with which critics have echoed Buñuel’s description of Deneuve as “abstract” and “blank” has also been tedious. The work of Catherine Breillat (Anatomy of Hell, Abuse of Weakness), to take one example, has served as an ideal response.
Thanks to Deneuve’s drawing power and the sexy material, Belle de Jour became Buñuel’s first international box office smash. For investors he became a safe bet, but it didn’t mean the old Surrealist had any interest in gratifying their middle class ideas about perversity. With the exception of the Spanish production Tristana, also starring Deneuve (and a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock’s, who during a liquid Hollywood lunch at John Ford’s kept laughing and patting Buñuel’s knee and saying,“That leg!”), every film after 1968 confounded expectations, from the examination of heresies in The Milky Way and the anything-goes miscellany of absurdities in The Phantom of Liberty to the culmination of the director’s aphoristic, fablistic late style in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, still the most loved of his work. As for Deneuve, the last twenty years have demonstrated an almost Elizabeth Taylor delight in playing without a hint of self-consciousness a series of hard-living women movies like A Christmas Tale, Potiche, and In the Name of My Daughter. Séverine would’ve been astonished.
Belle de Jour is playing at Coral Gables Art Cinema on Friday, May 18 to Sunday May 20.
Humanizing The Vacuum 