Belle de jour (1967) [The Criterion Collection #593] [ReUp]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: March 26, 2015

Belle de jour (1967)
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 16:9 | Artwork | 01:40:04 | 7,73 Gb
Audio: French AC3 1.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama | The Criterion Collection #593

Director: Luis Buñuel
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli

Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her after­noon hours working in a bordello. This surreal and erotic late-sixties daydream from provocateur for the ages Luis Buñuel is an examination of desire and fetishistic pleasure (its characters’ and its viewers’), as well as a gently absurdist take on contemporary social mores and class divisions. Fantasy and reality commingle in this burst of cinematic transgression, which was one of Buñuel’s biggest hits.

IMDB | Criterion | Wikipedia | Rotten Tomatoes | Roger Ebert

In Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour, Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, a blank-faced bourgeois housewife who learns how to feed her inner masochist when she begins prostituting herself during weekday afternoons at a tony Parisian brothel. The film was released the same year as Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, which also concerns seemingly “respectable” housewives prostituting themselves, although Godard’s interest in prostitution is primarily metaphorical, serving as a means to comment on the soul-draining demands of modern consumer culture, whereas for Buñuel it is psychological. He’s fascinated by the internal divides that allow Séverine to live two separate lives even though he openly resisted traditionally “psychological” interpretations of his films. Belle de jour, however, demands such a reading. A character study with surreal interludes and a rare film in which Buñuel depicts a member of the upper class with some sympathy and depth, it has a luxurious surface texture and was the first film Buñuel shot in color. However, it is at is most provocative when working in the strange netherworld of eroticism that is as disquieting as it is arousing, a painful conflation that beats at the heart of Buñuel’s sardonic worldview.


In a departure from the book by French journalist and novelist Joseph Kessel, Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (with whom he worked on five other films during his late period) introduce Séverine in her inner fantasy world, which is driven by conscious daydreams of humiliation, brutalization, and even rape. These fantasies contrast sharply with her placid home life, where she is married to a handsome and doting surgeon named Pierre (Jean Sorel) who is so decent that he maintains composure every time she rejects his sexual advances even though they have been married for a year.


Séverine’s sexual frigidity in her marriage belies her fantasy world, which is why she finds herself drawn to an upscale brothel in Paris run by Anaïs (Geneviève Page), an elegant, but demanding madam. There is much dialogue about the hidden nature of modern French prostitution, about how the red lights have been removed and it has essentially gone “underground” since the war, which fits perfectly with Séverine’s hidden sexual longings. It is only “underground” that she can submit to her own carnal desires.


Belle de jour is a tricky film in this regard, as it simultaneously challenges conventional sexual orthodoxy by embracing Séverine’s liberation via prostitution while also indulging in potentially problematic territory that equates female sexual desire with submission and humilation. The film moves back and forth between her lived experience and her inner fantasy world in ways that are often unmarked, which obscures the divide to the point that, by the end of the film, they are literally overlapping. The idea that Séverine is, in psychoanalytic terms, a masochist is never explicitly discussed in the film, and there is little explicit psychologizing to be found (Buñuel limits Séverine’s past to an extremely brief glimpse of her being molested as an adolescent and her subsequent refusal to accept communion, possibly out of guilt).


The film’s Freudian subtext is patently clear in retrospect, even if it is limited only to Séverine. We know (or really care) little about Pierre except that he is decent and bland, while virtually all of the other male characters are clients at the brothel exercising their paternalistic economic and sexual privilege (which here is one in the same). Thus, while one could charge that the film is misogynistic in its limiting of female sexuality to Séverine’s masochism, it does no better with the male characters with the exception of Pierre. Male sexuality in the film is best exemplified in Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), an unapologetic libertine who first tells Séverine about Anaïs’s brothel.


Thus, for Buñuel, a committed surrealist and provocateur, human sexuality, especially among the bourgeoisie, is just another form of absurdity that leads to misunderstanding and tragedy (he had already explored this is more directly comical terms in 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid, his first collaboration with Carrière). In this case, tragedy ensues from the collapse of Séverine’s two worlds, an event precipitated by her relationship with Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), a thuggish dandy-gangster with gold teeth and a cane who becomes sexually obsessed with her. He views his obsession as love, but his ultimate goal is simple possession, yet another of the film’s obvious swipes at the violence of male desire.


The fact that we can never fully reconcile Séverine and her actions is crucial to its meaning. When asked what she wants, Séverine’s answer is “I don’t know,” and we believe her. She doesn’t know exactly what she wants and why she does what she does, and neither do we. The casting of Deneuve, a rising star who had previously played both sexual psychosis in Roman Polanski’s Replusion (1965) and lighthearted charm in Jacques Demy’s musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), is essential in this regard. Deneuve’s blankness as an actress in her early years matches perfectly with Séverine’s lack of self-understanding, and we find ourselves searching her countenance—in vain, as it turns out—for some indication of what is happening inside her mind. From a feminist perspective, it is easy to argue that Belle de jour is both liberating and repressive, but its true message is that we are all on some level inscrutable.
QNetwork

Special Features:
- New high-definition digital restoration
- Audio commentary featuring Michael Wood, author of the BFI Film Classics book Belle de jour
- New video piece featuring writer and sexual-politics activist Susie Bright and film scholar Linda Williams
- New interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
- Segment from the French television program Cinéma, featuring interviews with Carrière and actress Catherine Deneuve
- Original and rerelease trailers
- New English subtitle translation

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