BELLE DE JOUR Movie Review

In a British edition of the published screenplay of Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel reveals not only that his most popular masterpiece—a film in which each image seems painstakingly planned and executed—was completely edited in twelve hours, but also decides one very big, previously controversial issue for us all: “You know of course,” Buñuel remarks, “that it's a pornographic film?” He qualifies this statement by describing his movie as containing “chaste eroticism,” but then adds the ringer: “I never try to scandalize people,” the director says, “but they sometimes scandalize themselves.” Amen. And when we do, we usually find that Luis Buñuel has already made a movie about us. Take this one. The impossibly beautiful Catherine Deneuve, at her chilliest and most impenetrable, is Séverine, the seemingly contented bourgeois wife of an affluent, handsome physician. Yet if Séverine is so contented, why is she daydreaming of being tied to a tree at the command of her husband in preparation for being whipped and ravished by a vile, foul coachman? It would seem that Séverine's sexual fantasies are struggling to find expression, but there is clearly no place for them in the spotless, neat apartment in which the couple live. Nor is there any room for them in Séverine's ordered life. So, in the only way she knows how, Séverine creates a neat, orderly place in which to put them. The house of prostitution where she allows herself to be pleasurably abused on weekday afternoons becomes another part of Séverine's ordered routine—until her other, “normal” world collides with it in an unexpected way, causing Séverine's repressed sexual world to explode in a kind of bourgeois critical mass. Buñuel, irrepressible anarchist that he was (as well as the cinema's only true surrealist) has made something far more exciting than a pornographic movie. The deep humor inherent in poor Séverine's quiet, unacknowledged sexual frenzy, rendered poignant by her cluelessness and comic by her beauty, receives such a delicate, multi-layered presentation from Buñuel that it only seems appropriate to refer to him as a master. As long as sexual feelings—at least some of them—are “inappropriate” (or now, perhaps, un-PC) in bourgeois life, Séverine's story will remain touching, powerful, and deeply, darkly funny. Hail to the master.

NEXT STOP … Tristana, La Cérémonie, The Piano

1967 (R) 100m/C FR Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Genevieve Page, Michel Piccoli, Francesco Rabal, Pierre Clementi, Georges Marchal, Francoise Fabian; D: Luis Bunuel; W: Luis Bunuel, Jean-Claude Carriere; C: Sacha Vierny.VHS, LV TOU