pyrocitor
Godard may have quipped that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, but Luis Buñuel knew better: all you need to make a movie is a girl and her imagination. Picture this: opening credits beckon us in to a peaceful, aristocratic countryside carriage ride, with almost histrionically dull effete banter between suave, chirpy husband (Jean Sorel; exquisitely bland) and stony, disaffected wife (Catherine Deneuvre). But don't worry - the drolleries only last minutes before they're interrupted by a rape and bondage sequence orchestrated with carnivalesque bounciness, making it almost as disturbingly cheery as it is jarring. It's polarizing, distanciating, and risks losing any particularly prim viewers within the first five minutes. And, naturally, it's completely false. And thus, having successfully doubly(!) yanked the rug out from under us within roughly the first five minutes, the only thing we know to be real about Buñuel's Belle de Jour is its commitment to falsehoods - and therein lies its playful, magnetic, fascination that lingers more than any voyeuristic titillation.Belle de Jour is still regarded, doubtlessly with a nervous chuckle in some circles, as one of the earliest films conflating eroticism and artistry. Yet it's shy even for the swinging' 60s in terms of depicting actual sex on screen - cleverly, Buñuel realizes that for us, as for Deneuvre's bored-housewife-turned-high-class-prostitute Séverine, sex is best when left up to the imagination. But the film is anything but shy in its voracious, almost fidget-inducing satire of antiquated, monolithic gender roles, with Séverine's stagnant facade of happy upper-class home life being the film's most brazen illusion of all, and her escape into the equally constraining and prescriptive role of men's sexual fetish object in an attempt to actualize her lurid fantasies evoking a sour laugh in itself. Over time, Buñuel's slow-born critique unearths a viciously tongue-in-cheek account of the dissonance between Séverine tentatively but aggressively trying to wrestle her own meaning out of a life full of people trying to dictate hers - her husband, society, their pretentiously aristocratic neighbours, especially Michel Piccoli's eloquently unrepentant horndog - with the results being as sordidly funny, and, inevitably, deeply sad as anyone would expect. Pacing is appropriately dreamy, verging the line of excessively languid, but Buñuel packs each frame with tantalizingly subtle details of characterization and foreshadowing, keeping the fantasy/reality playfully hazy throughout. Some, like Roger Ebert, point to the subtlest of sound cues to differentiate the two, but it's just as possible these are as much of a red herring as any of the film's more prurient interchanges. Each of 'Belle de Jour''s colourful trysts allow for gleefully salacious scene-stealing bits, most memorably a teasing "what's in the box?" moment that Mr. Quentin Tarantino, amongst countless others, can thank Buñuel for (and here, like its homage in Pulp Fiction, the answer is fiendishly simple: it's whatever you want it to be). Like any self-respecting French film from the '60s there are gangsters, as cartoonishly grotesque as they are impossibly slick, particularly Pierre Clémenti's sulky, cane-wielding vampire. And then: that legendarily ambiguous ending, the film's most innocuously and and subtly perverse of all. Unless, of course, it's just another rug-yank, that Buñuel, that scoundrel, never quite shows his hand with. Perhaps, it's simply macrocosmic of the earlier mystery box: it's whatever we want it (or most fear it) to be. Still, the film reaches the annals of legend almost singularly through Catherine Deneuvre's rivetingly inaccessible performance. It takes an actor of rare talent who can anchor a film of guiding an audience through every scene while remaining so impenetrably deadpan, but Deneuvre's cool, chic glassiness bleeds out just enough flints of a vast inner world of yearning and desire that even she may not be fully privy to. She barely speaks throughout the film, but her eyes and the smallest moments of relaxing her shoulders are more subtly revelatory than the most stentorian soliloquies, the delicate power therein making her work here truly unforgettable. Based on Joseph Kessel's novel, Buñuel's Belle de Jour's play with sexual, ideological restriction and release is too sharp not to have inspired a number of real life accounts. Most vocal about her experiences is Brooke Magnati, who herself reappropriated the titular billing for a series of books based on her own call-girl experience as an upper- echelon prostitute while completing her PhD which, naturally, are themselves now being adapted into a film. Fantasy inspiring fantasy inspiring reality inspiring fantasy? Sounds about right.-9/10
gavin6942
A frigid young housewife (Catherine Deneuve) decides to spend her midweek afternoons as a prostitute.Catherine Deneuve is one of the European greats. Americans (myself included) are not familiar with many foreign actors or actresses, but she is one that was able to break through into our world, and without even having to speak English (though that often helps). She is as good here as in anything she has done.Being a Bunuel film, it is a bit surreal, a bit odd. The story is more or less straightforward, except that various scenes blend fantasy and reality, dream and real life. Not as strange as some of his stuff, but still odd enough. The man with the box is especially interesting, and one cannot help but wonder if it inspired Tarantino. Surely, it must have.
