Luis Buñuel (1967)

A coach and horses move along a large avenue, approaching the camera.   A young couple sits in the carriage behind the two coachmen.  The man tells the woman he loves her and asks reproachfully why she is so cold.  When the coach stops, the woman is dragged into nearby woodland and tied up.  Her clothes are partly torn off and one of the coachmen – glimpsed in an earlier shot as under-employed, as his older colleague controlled the horses – whips her repeatedly.  He then begins to fondle her.  The young woman, who screamed at the beginning of her ordeal, turns her head slightly:  her expression suggests the coachman’s abusive attentions aren’t so bad after all.  The camera then cuts to a bedroom with en suite bathroom.  The room has twin beds, one containing the woman we’ve just seen savagely assaulted.  The man who was with her in the coach comes from the bathroom and gets into the other bed.  He raises the possibility of sharing hers but the woman declines and he accepts the situation. We now realise the previous sequence took place in the woman’s imagination.  This is the richly amusing opening of Belle de Jour.   Luis Buñuel tricks the audience into assuming the coach and horses scene is for real.  The chaste bedroom arrangement, as Manny Farber noted, seems a laughing reference to the Hays Code[1].  The young woman and man – the alluringly frozen Séverine Sérizy (Catherine Deneuve) and her politely exasperated husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) – seem just the way they did in the carriage episode.  Except that, in reality, there’s no hint of sexual violence.

The elegant setting of Séverine’s opening masochistic fantasy has a past-times flavour – the modern dress of the coach’s passengers is momentarily surprising – but this proves to be apt.  Belle de Jour is based on a novel (of the same name, by Joseph Kessel) published in 1928; and Buñuel, who wrote the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière, is blithely and cannily selective in what he does and doesn’t update.  The setting is mid-1960s Paris.  Catherine Deneuve is dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent.  Yet when, in the back of a taxi, her friend Renée (Macha Méril) shares with her the news that super-respectable Henriette, a mutual acquaintance, has turned part-time prostitute, Séverine appears less shocked than uncomprehending.  While Henriette’s behaviour is unusual enough for Renée to see it as outrageously tasty gossip, Séverine’s baffled reaction is of one who’s led a very sheltered life – an ingénue of a less sexually permissive time.  This serves one of Buñuel’s main purposes.  He’s able to imply that the mores of his abhorred bourgeoisie endure – in a way that he couldn’t if Séverine were thoroughly embedded in the past.

Belle de Jour moves with fluent concision towards the heart of its story.  The regretfully frigid Séverine is angered and threatened by the overtures of suave immoralist Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), a friend of the Sérizys, but it’s thanks to him that she comes by the address of a particular brothel, at 11 Cité de Jean Saumur.  She visits the place and, after a couple of false starts, follows Henriette’s example, as a means of both realising her sexual fantasies and solving her marital problems.  She adopts the professional name ‘Belle de Jour’, a play on belle de nuit that also reflects Séverine’s limited hours of business:  she works only from two to five in the afternoon, in order to return home before her husband.  (Pierre is a hospital surgeon who, with next to nothing expected of him in the bedroom, spends most of his evenings on unexplained paperwork.)  Buñuel inserts a couple of brief flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood:  in the first of these, a middle-aged man paws the girl Séverine (Dominique Dandrieux); in the second, she refuses the communion wafer in church.   These bits feel like shorthand psychoanalysis:  they suggest reasons for Séverine to be fearful of sex and see it as punitive, and her appetite for sacrilege.  Although the objectification of Catherine Deneuve makes it hard to see Belle de Jour as proto-feminist, the film functions as a satirical commentary on the polarised roles of women in the society to which Séverine belongs.  Until she sells her body, she has no job.  Her domestic role is purely – in two ways purely – decorative.  She’s part of the furnishings of the Sérizys’ tasteful, soulless home.  Pierre tells his wife that his dearest wish is that she should bear his child.  It’s as if Séverine faces a stark choice of sexual identities:  she can be either a mother-in-waiting or a whore.

Séverine’s afternoon activities are starting to help thaw her in the marriage bed when the separation of her two lives is violated, thanks to the obsession of a brothel client, the young gangster Marcel (Pierre Clémenti).  He discovers where she lives and visits her, threatening to reveal her secret to Pierre.  After Séverine has begged him to leave, Marcel does so and shoots Pierre, who is on his way home, in the street outside.  In the ensuing chase, Marcel is shot dead by the police.  Pierre has been seriously injured and, for some time afterwards, is in a coma.  Husson made clear to Séverine in their first conversation about 11 Cité de Jean Saumur that he patronised the place, so it’s no surprise when he too turns up there as one of Belle de Jour’s clients.  They don’t have sex, however, and Husson assures her he won’t spill the beans to Pierre.  When the latter returns from hospital – wheelchair-bound, blind, mute and helpless – Husson changes his mind.   He tells Séverine that knowing the truth about her will assuage Pierre’s guilt that he can no longer be a proper man.  Husson’s revelation brings about an apparently miraculous cure:  Pierre instantly recovers the powers of sight, speech and independent movement.  He pours himself a drink and asks his wife what she’s thinking about.   She replies that she’s thinking about him.   Fin.  The implication is that husband and wife, having completed a bizarre rite of passage, can now settle down to conventional bourgeois married life yet this finale is confoundingly ambiguous – by now the borderline between real life and fantasy feels much more porous than in the film’s opening juxtaposition of the two.

Although enjoyably suggestive and apparently subversive, Belle de Jour is in some respects softer than might be expected – this is a softness different from the amused, equable derision with which Buñuel treats the characters in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).  Husson is right when he tells Séverine that Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) runs a nice class of brothel at 11 Cité de Jean Saumur.  There’s an amusing contrast between our first sight of Anaïs – frowzy and faintly used-looking in her robe and slippers when Séverine calls outside office hours – and her subsequent appearances, as the professional lady of the house.  But the main contrast between Séverine’s home and workplace is in terms of space – the acreage of the Sérizys’ drawing room vs the brothel’s cramped parlour and narrow corridor.  Buñuel eschews the grubby possibilities of the fragrant Séverine’s new afternoon routine.  She doesn’t seem incongruous in the company of the well-groomed Madame Anaïs or, more significantly, her fellow prostitutes (Françoise Fabian and Maria Latour) – even though the latter are full-time sex workers rather than undercover hautes bourgeoises.  The clients and their fetishes are no more than mildly entertaining:  a standard convivial lech (Francis Blanche); a little professor (François Maistre) yearning for corporal punishment; a large Oriental (Iska Khan) literally with bells on:  these echo the sound of the carriage horses and bring a rare smile to Séverine’s face.  The only perversions with any impact are those of an aging aristocrat (Georges Marchal), whom Séverine meets outside the brothel (and possibly in her fantasy life).  At his invitation, she visits the duke at his stately home.  She’s required to wander round the place in nothing but a voluminous black veil and a chaplet, and lie in a coffin, while he addresses her as his daughter and masturbates (off camera).  

Catherine Deneuve was only twenty-three when she made this film.  Her youth, at least in long retrospect, mitigates the alienating effect of Séverine’s chilly sullenness and gives Deneuve’s flawless, porcelain beauty a hint of fledgling uncertainty.  (Whether that’s what Buñuel wanted is another matter.)  This is one of those cases where a performer and the role they’re playing are hard to disentwine – and where the actor’s limitations strengthen their mystique on screen.  The BFI programme note  (I’d seen the film there once before, ten or so years ago) included an extract from Michael Wood’s 2000 monograph on Belle de Jour.  Wood perceptively highlights the moment when Deneuve:

‘…. is supposed to drop a vase full of flowers by accident … she can’t do it:  she manifestly throws the thing on the floor.  Poor acting, this, probably – or it would have been had Buñuel not chosen to keep the shot.  As it is, it looks as if the character is pretending to drop the vase, trying to control the very realm of chance, as if she thinks nervousness itself is a matter of icy discipline, to be satisfied by a fastidious imitation of the distress you really feel.’

The piece goes on to compare Deneuve to American blonde precursors  – Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren – and what happens to them in Hitchcock films, where each ‘becomes a doll to be dressed up and manipulated, even violated, by the director and by the chief male character’.  Wood reasonably concludes that Deneuve ‘is not a doll in Belle de Jour, she is an enigma’.  Pierre Clémenti’s Marcel isn’t sufficiently stylised: Clémenti just seems like a weak actor straining for raw realism.  Otherwise, the supporting cast is excellent.  Pierre is described by Husson as ‘a boy scout’ and by Manny Farber as the ‘beefy male-model husband’. Both descriptions are accurate but Jean Sorel makes Dr Sérizy’s well-mannered chauvinism oddly engaging.  Michel Piccoli is expert as Husson, the heroine’s subversive conscience.  The Marcel subplot overstays its welcome but Francisco Rabal, as an older hood, is some compensation for that.

12 September 2017

[1] ‘The inch-from-convention bedroom innocuities …’, wrote Farber, ‘have to be a pun on all Hollywood movies:  Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett in neat, expensively sheeted twin beds, the man always wearing white rayon pajamas with blue piping, a pair of white slippers alongside, in between the beds a little table with lamp, clock and a cup of hot Bovril’.