Review of Belle de Jour (1967) by Elvira B — 03 Jan 2011

Séverine and Pierre have just been married. He works most of the day at a hospital, and she stays home. She doesn't do the household chores; there's a maid to do that. Sometimes she plays tennis with her friend Renée. In all truth, she does nothing, and as the film begins her descent into ennui is evident, and helpless. All the while, her relationship with Pierre is celibate, as she cannot bring herself to be intimate with him; for that reason her daydreams grow increasingly intense, erotic and even masochistic. She realizes she must find an outlet for her desires outside of the marital bed.

One day, on a skiing vacation, Renée tells Severine that another 'respectable' housewife is known to be working at a brothel by day. Soon after, Pierre's friend Mr. Hussen, a man fascinated by Severine's virtue and by the idea of corrupting her, gives her the address of his "favorite whorehouse". And so Severine sets out to become Belle de Jour, for her own sake.

The main story of Belle de Jour is not surrealistic itself; in fact it's quite "grounded" and connected to perfectly relatable feelings and motives from most characters. There are recurrent dreams but they can be told apart from 'reality' with few exceptions. However, this doesn't mean that Buñuel's social commentary isn't as biting as in the rest of his work: one of the things that he makes stand out in the film is the obvious double morale in Severine's bourgeois circle, in which it's perfectly okay for men to visit whorehouses, but almost criminal for a woman to freely decide to work in one.

Michel Piccoli, although he's never been entirely of my liking, gives a great performance as the man whose mediocre 'libertinage' first shakes Severine's restless spirit. Jean Sorel is also very good as the innocent, unbearably understanding Pierre, and Macha Méril is lovely as always as Renée. However, Belle de Jour belongs to Deneuve and to Pierre Clémenti, who plays one of Severine's clients, a young criminal who falls madly in love? (or in lust?) with her. His performance is short but incredibly intense, tragic, and steals the show in all his scenes. He had that same menacing containment (a time-bomb quality) that Klaus Kinski became famous for. I think he's one of the main reasons to watch the film.

Catherine Deneuve's performance is astonishing: she changes ever so slightly as she discovers herself; she struggles to be a 'good' prostitute and evolves gracefully into the girl with the highest demand. Her walk grows less stiff, her smile becomes easier, but she never loses that high-class elegance that caused such a stir in Madame Anais's establishment. She's nothing short of wonderful and I can't imagine anyone else in this part.

Belle de Jour is as close as I've seen Buñuel get to a character study. In a subtle way he seems to empathize with Severine and make her self-inflicted emotional confinement come across with the same urgency as she experiences it, so regardless of our personal views on prostitution we have no doubt that she is doing what she deems appropriate to save herself (in this case Buñuel tries to 'explain' Severine with some flashbacks from her childhood)... It is an unusual subject, but an important one nevertheless: it isn't rare that our biggest limitations should come from within ourselves.