 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Luis Buñuel, 1967, France/Italy, 102 mins, French with subtitles
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clementi
The wittiest, most elegant film about weird sexual fantasies ever made, Buñuel’s surreal, satirical, erotic masterpiece is one of the great treasures of world cinema. The sublime Deneuve enjoys one of her finest roles, as bored newlywed Severine who indulges her sadomasochistic impulses by working in a high-class Parisian brothel. Like a wide-eyed Alice exploring a fetishist wonderland, Severine indulges bizarre fantasies: a businessman who enjoys being dominated, a wealthy aristocrat obsessed with his dead daughter and a portly Japanese gentleman with a mysterious buzzing box. However, things go awry when dentally challenged gangster, Marcel (Clementi) uncovers Severine’s double life. Obsessed, he sets out to possess her.
Whereas dumb, ideologically stunted, ‘erotic thrillers’ like Basic Instinct (1992) tackle the subject in an hysterical way, Buñuel approaches sexual impulses as an essential part of human nature, understanding our vulnerabilities and inner lives. As Severine herself reveals to her husband (Porel): “Every day I feel myself growing closer to you.” Belle De Jour charms and unsettles in equal measure, with witty, insightful dialogue, exquisite cinematography by Sacha Vierny (Last Year at Marienbad (1961)), and Buñuel’s masterly way with blending fantasy and reality. The whole movie unfolds like one of Severine’s daydreams: flashbacks, erotic fantasies, drama and melodrama all coalesce into a whole that is quintessentially Buñuel. Here was an artist whose skill at teasing out the weird and the fantastic out of the everyday, not just in visuals, but also his characters’ idiosyncratic behaviour could give David Lynch a run for his money.
The film starts with a teasing shock that must have had audiences reeling back in 1967: under orders from her husband, two coachman bind, whip and ravish Severine until it is revealed this is her own erotic daydream. Severine wants it all, freedom to explore her own sexuality and a loving relationship with her husband. While tragedy is perhaps inevitable, Buñuel refuses to condemn his heroine’s behaviour, quite unlike latter day erotic films that equate female sexuality with poisonous, male devouring, spider women. His natural anarchist leanings mean he’s behind the daydreaming fantasist all the way.
Belle De Jour was Buñuel’s biggest commercial success. Something the director himself, in his autobiography My Last Breath, attributed to “…the exquisite whores.” There’s no denying, in addition to being a magnificent actress, Deneuve is one of the world’s most beautiful women, the epitome of Gallic elegance and cinema’s definitive, ice-cool blonde with simmering passions lying underneath. Strange she never made a film with Hitchcock, but thirty years on she’s still going strong with one of the finest bodies… of work (Get your minds out of the gutter!) an actress has ever assembled. Long may she reign.
Belle De Jour 40th Anniversary Edition opens on a brand new print exclusively at the National Film Theatre on Friday 29th December. |
