The masterpiece that inspired a thousand soft-porn cash-ins
Fifty years on, Luis Buñuel’s ‘Belle de Jour’ remains as sly, funny and influential as ever, says Tim Robey
‘Belle de nuit” is the French term for a lady of the night. For Séverine, the heroine of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 erotic reverie Belle de
Jour, this career is a temptation, but not really an option: she is married to a handsome surgeon called Pierre, who gives her all the outward trappings of a happy life.
Something, though, is evidently missing. In the film’s famous opening, Séverine and Pierre are in a horsedrawn carriage down a tree-lined country lane, when she recoils from his advances. He orders the coachmen to pull up, they dump Séverine to the ground, and then chase her into some woods, where they flog her with riding crops, and implicitly rape her.
It turns out to be a daydream, this fantasy of subjugation, but it expresses something more real than the empty rituals of Séverine’s daily life, as a lady who lunches in high Parisian circles. Step by curious step, she inches into prostitution, making herself available in a high-class brothel, but strictly between two and five in the afternoon, when the unsuspecting Pierre is busy. Hence “Belle de Jour” – “lady of the day” – which becomes her official sobriquet. Belle de Jour is reissued this week for its 50th anniversary. In its day, it was Luis Buñuel’s most successful film, which is not surprising: it had the highly exploitable asset of Catherine Deneuve, at her most glacially beautiful, being roughly paraded in and out of compromising situations. Hers was the face that launched a thousand soft-porn cash-ins about bored housewives.
Indeed, 25 years after the film was first released, it received a London reissue in 1992 which explicitly billed it as soft porn to lure in the raincoat brigade, and broke the house record in both venues.
The sexual content of the film is astonishingly tame by today’s standards. There’s very little overt nudity, and nothing more than heavy petting between Séverine and her clients – certainly nothing that could legitimately be called a sex scene. What it does have is a wickedly unbridled sense of role-play about dominance and submission. It flings open a whole dress-up box of S&M fetishes.
Buñuel was not, at first, hugely attracted to the project, when his producers suggested adapting the novel, a 1928 melodrama by Joseph Kessel. It was “too soap-opera-ish” for his tastes, until conversations with the screenwriter Jean-claude Carrière encouraged him to find a way.
Constant, ambiguous slippage between reality and fantasy was the answer. Even the brothel run by
‘It casts a long shadow over all depictions of restless, unsatisfied sex lives in films to come’
Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) feels so chic as to be scarcely credible – it was hardly Buñuel’s intention to delve into social realism, more to conduct a series of what-if experiments with the female libido.
He also devised a clever way out of Kessel’s ending – a tragic business, with Pierre (Jean Sorel) paralysed in a shooting by one of Séverine’s jealous clients, Marcel (Pierre Clementi), and Séverine racked with guilt when her husband, now in a wheelchair, will no longer speak to her.
Buñuel gives us this ending first, and then a happier, quasi-miraculous variation on it: the very tenuous line between reality and illusion enables them to be given equal weight.
It’s crucial that Buñuel never tips us off about what’s “really” or “really not” going on. Every sequence is shot in the same unimpressed, matter-of-fact style, including the lurid, almost Hammer-esque development at a country house when Séverine lies down in a coffin, posing as the dead daughter of a Duke while he pleasures himself.
It begins to make no difference to the psychological value of each scene whether Séverine has placed herself in it imaginatively, or actually. They’re all steps on her road to erotic liberation.
Belle de Jour was a great critical success for Buñuel, too, winning him the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival. Sly, teasing, and deeply funny, it casts a long shadow over all depictions of restless, unsatisfied sex lives in films to come.
Consider the unhappily married bourgeois couple played by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) – he’s even a doctor – or the bondage games between James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary (2002). Or consider this very year’s Venice talking point, Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!, in which the elephant in the room – before an entire herd of additional ones barge in – is why even Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem have lost their mojo.
A 50th anniversary restoration of Belle de Jour is reissued in UK cinemas today