Belle de Jour
Set in the landscape of dreams, there is a brief cutaway scene in Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour as Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) ascends the stairs to a brothel for the first time. Dressed in an Yves Saint-Laurent military-inspired trench, wearing dark sunglasses, she rounds the corner. Following her gaze, we hear a Latin prayer. We are no longer in Paris but by a tabernacle where a priest offers communion to a young blond child. Holding the host to a young Séverine’s mouth, she purses her lips, refusing. Frustrated he whispers, “What’s the matter with you?” An adult Séverine continues to climb the stairs.
In a new restoration, the cool-toned landscape of Buñuel’s dream is centred on an ice-queen housewife, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), who begins working as a call-girl in the afternoon. Inspired, in part, by the seminal erotic text Venus in Furs by von Sacher-Masoch about a young man’s masochistic desire for an older woman, Buñuel puts the focus on Séverine and her journey down an erotic rabbit hole.
Rather than treat sex as an aspect of morality, it becomes a tool to dismantle institutions like marriage, religion and class by exposing their hypocrisies. As the film begins, Séverine wakes from a dream and we witness her sexless home life. Her husband, to whom she has the demeanour and stiffness of a child, is gentle and kind. On a weekend trip, they have a lunch with the lecherous Husson, (the legendary Michel Piccoli), who inspires her fantasies. He even provides the address where she will work, a throwaway line she stows in her dreams.
In the carefully manufactured world of Buñuel’s surrealism, the binds of time and place are flexible. Signalled by mewling cats and ringing bells, Séverine’s imagination invades the real world with increased frequency. Rendering the familiar unfamiliar, the deconstruction of reality doesn’t include melting clocks, but a narrative reversal in which the subconscious world reaches the surface. As Séverine falls deeper into ecstasy, her bubbling erotic imagination takes full force.
Early in the film, visual contrasts set a disconcerting tone. As Séverine meets her first John, the camera focuses on her snow-white, manicured hand caressing his greasy balding head. As she falls deeper, a Japanese man arrives with a vibrating box. One girl is horrified, but Séverine acquiesces and is left in an orgasmic daze. While there are many reasonable answers to the box’s contents, its mysteriousness in conjunction with the film’s dream logic fuels the film’s unbalanced energy. As men around Séverine hunger to disfigure her beauty through sex and violence, the power of her imagination only grows stronger. Her inner world has not only been unlocked, but has continued to grow, influencing and infecting all aspects of her life.
Like all of Buñuel’s work, Belle de Jour exposes the hypocritical treatment of sex through a surrealist lens. Poetic and wickedly funny, the film positions one woman’s dream world as having the ability to question the nature of reality itself. Using the power of the erotic imagination, it dismantles structures of authority, liberating the mind from the repressive pressures of society, that seeks to control sex in order to control the citizenry.
With its restoration, Belle de Jour has never looked better. One of the most wildly entertaining films in Buñuel’s oeuvre, it not only offers a great introduction to his work but also a fantastic opportunity for old fans to see the film in a new light. Deneuve is even more luminous, and she captures the aloof, sardonic tone of Buñuel’s work perfectly. Beautiful and bewildering, this is a rare opportunity to see one of the greatest films of the 20th century on the big screen. ★★★★★