Francedrama1967 color 100 min.
Director: Luis Bunuel
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1442L

Catherine Deneuve was not yet twenty-three when Luis Buñuel cast her for the title role in his coolly outrageous Belle de Jour. Many people thought her the most beautiful woman in the world. Look magazine even said so on its cover. Buñuel surely agreed.

First shown here in 1967, Belle de Jour has been out of circulation for at least fifteen years. The current rerelease has been engineered by the enterprising Miramax, and the movie fits right into its slate of hits: In its deadpan, deceptively glossy way, Belle de Jour is trickier than Exotica, kinkier than The Crying Game, and more blasphemous than Priest. The erotic reveries of the then sixty-six-year-old surrealist have scarcely dated. Nor has Deneuve's ineffable chic as the obscure object of Buñuel's desire. As Séverine, a well-bred Parisian matron who spends her afternoons working in a brothel, Deneuve appears in varying states of déshabille or, as dressed by Yves Saint Laurent, in many fetching outfits -- her body fragmented, almost cubistically, by Buñuel's camera into its different, fetishized components.

Perversely unresponsive to the exaggeratedly kind, handsome, devoted, and wealthy young surgeon to whom she is married (and whom she loves), Séverine dreams of her husband's latent cruelty and amuses herself by imagining violent or humiliating bouts of anonymous sex. This haute bourgeoise housewife is no ordinary masochist -- she is attracted to pain but, rather, wishes to surrender her will. Séverine is fascinated by brothels because, as a friend points out, "in those places one has no choice," although it's entirely her choice to be there (and on her own terms). The madam and whores in the respectable, if less than deluxe, maison where S@#233verine works are never less than impressed with her breeding.

Buñuel, who never presumes to judge his heroine, was commissioned to adapt Belle de Jour from a once-shocking psychological novel by Joseph Kessel -- the 1928 equivalent to The Story of O. "I hope I can save such a stale subject by missing indiscriminately and without warning in the montage the things that actually happen to the heroine, and the fantasies and morbid impulses which she imagines," the filmmaker said at the time -- and indeed he does. Belle de Jour's wide-eyed fantasies within fantasies within fantasies (within the framing fantasy of an advertising-perfect Paris) suggest a kind of erotic Alice in Wonderland.

As a movie, Belle de Jour is founded on Buñuel's genius for free-associative chitchat and orchestrated Freudian slips. As moment-to-moment unpredictable as Un Chien Andalou or L'Age d'Or, the venerable avant-garde shockers the young Buñuel made in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Belle de Jour reaches its climax when Séverine's fantasies finally go violently out of control. The movie is, however, teasingly open-ended. In a final joke, suggesting the narrative equivalent of a spatially ambiguous Necker cube, Buñuel offers two mutually exclusive dénouements.

Although slammed by irate French reviewers when it first appeared ("One can¹t believe that such bad dreams could go on inside Catherine Deneuve's pretty head," Le Monde sniffed), Belle de Jour turned out to be Buñuel's biggest commercial success. It is also a perfect film.

-- J. Hoberman

Courtesy Vanity Fair. © 1995 The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Cast

Séverine Serizy: Catherine Deneuve
Pierre Serizy: Jean Sorel
Henri Husson: Michel Piccoli
Madame Anaïs: Geneviève Page
Marcel: Pierre Clementi
Hippolyte: Francisco Rabal
Charlotte: Françoise Fabian
Mathilde: Maria Latour
The Duke: Georges Marchal
Renée Fevret: Macha Meril
Pallas: Muni
M. Adolphe: Francis Blanche

CREDITS

Produced by: Robert and Raymond Hakim
Directed by: Luis Buñuel
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière
Based on the novel by: Joseph Kessel of the French Academy, Editions Gallimard
Director of photography: Sacha Vierny
Chief editor: Louisette Hautecoeur
Art director: Robert Clavel
Ms. Deneuve's wardrobe: Yves Saint Laurent

About the transfer

Belle de Jour is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1. The transfer was made from a new 35mm low contrast print. The sound was created from 35mm magnetic tracks. Transfer by Rich Garibaldi, Four Media Company, Burbank, CA. New English subtitle translation by Lys Vereycken and Intersound, Inc.
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