Review of Belle de Jour (1967) by Steve A — 03 Feb 2014

Catherine Deneuve stars as Severine, a bored bourgeois housewife who has a rather frigid sex life with her husband. She assumes a double life and goes and works for a high class brothel where she feels safe to explore and satisfy her prolific sexual fantasies.

For such a sexual storyline, the film is rather chaste and this is its advantage. Sex is never shown on camera and the fetishes of her clients are hinted at and left to the imagination. A great scene has her presented with a buzzing box by an Asian client. The only thing shown is the look on their faces which give little away and the audiences imaginations are left to run wild.

Severine's dual life is upset when she falls for a gangster client who infracts into her respectable life with dire consequences.

It is certainly a film of its time. Highly stylised in the look and also the attitude of the mid-sixties. It could be mistaken as a take on a male fantasy, but the film never completely subjugates the women and it is Severine who is experimenting with her own sexuality and no character's psychology is stamped out as this or that.

It's a beautifully complex film, bizarre at times, but never simple.