"Belle De Jour" - Film Review

Catherine Deneuve is good at playing impenetrable. It’s difficult to play blankness; it can come off as bad acting rather than ambiguity. It helps that Deneuve is young and incredibly attractive. She’s classically beautiful and the film plays against expectations

Deneuve plays a woman, Severine Serizy, who’s adrift, and sexually frustrated. She’s no longer sleeping with her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). And she inexplicably decides to become a high class prostitute after learning about a whorehouse. She spends her afternoons when her husband is at work working a brothel.

When we first meet her in the film’s opening scene, we see her in what we learn is a dream, and a very twisted one. It’s more nightmare or dark fantasy than a typical dream. Director Luis Buñuel is setting the tone and the mood with the scene. Bunuel was notorious for his films that attempted to startle and unsettle with their imagery. (Think of Un Chien Andalou). Here we see a quaint carriage ride that quickly turns into a twisted bondage, rape fantasy. 

Severine clearly has a troubled mind. The film keeps cutting away to dreams, daydreams, fantasies, memories. Eventually it’s hard to tell what these visions are. We see her as a child, where she is molested, and participating in the Eucharist. She’s been sexually repressed, but her longing leads her to Madame Ansais’ (Genevieve Page) brothel, given information for the apartment’s location by a family friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli - a man who keeps making advances on her that she denies and yet appears in her fantasy, dreams, and memories). 

At the whorehouse she participates in and witnesses a number of disturbing sexual rituals and fantasies played out. There’s a professor with a messed up sense of role playing. She drives out to a man’s home where she’s not asked for sexual favors but to act like the corpse of the man’s dead wife.

And yet despite how strange this all is, she seems to be taking pleasure out of it. This is especially true after she foolishly falls for and leads on a criminal, Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who attends the brothel. The guy is unstable and violent, but she longs for him. 

Eventually this all ends badly. She’s from a comfortable, reasonably well-off middle class lifestyle, and she has little business being here. The other prostitutes are there because they need money and the pay is good. She is there to fill some need within herself that even she can’t quite explain. A client ends up being Henri and he threatens to tell her husband. Marcel becomes obsessive, and she leaves the business to avoid contact with him. But he shows up at her home and then shoots her husband. 

The film ends with Severine's husband, essentially a vegetable now, sprung back to life at the discovery of the information from Henri. The soundtrack plays strange sounds, including the sound of the bells from the carriage. And then we cut to a shot of the carriage from the beginning and it's now empty. Has Severine changed? What does it all mean? Bunuel may not necessarily be concerned with meaning. He wants us to react to his surreal and absurd imagery and contemplate what it all means. But the imagery is as alluring (and disturbing) as the erotica that Deneuve participates in. Bunuel skillfully balances the surreal imagery with a fascinating character study about bourgeois repression.    

Grade: B+