Review of Belle de Jour (1967) by Jason M — 16 Mar 2010

Belle de Jour is one of the few films about eroticism that really gets it right - it knows that eroticism is in the mind, not the body. The always luminous Catherine Deneuve plays Severine - a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and fundamentally empty. She is married to a good provider, the handsome but boring Pierre (Jean Sorel), and enjoys all the idle upper-middle class accouterments.

But something is wrong in this greeting-card perfect world. Severine seems to find erotic satisfaction only in the repressed desire to be humilated and used sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and bound to trees. This lurid fantasy life leads her to seek employment as a part-time prostitute - but only during the day, before her husband gets home.

Complications arise when her double life is discovered by her husband's friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), and when she finds herself the subject of a stalker - a dangerously obsessed customer named Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who also happens to be a violence-prone thief.

Though it sounds like fodder for a typical Hollywood "erotic thriller", what develops from these elements is a psychological study that, for all its depths, appears to remain moot about just what makes the main character tick.

Central to the film is Deneuve's work. Under Luis Bunuel's precise, disciplined direction, she delivers a performance that is icy, opaque, and ultimately heartbeaking. Yes, she seems distant, and that is precisely the point: the much talked-about ending, by its very ambiguity, shocks us with the revelation that we've been fooled all along. Severine is not unreadable because she is hiding dark motivations. Rather, she is a dreamy, empty vessel; abused as a child (as we see in subtle flashbacks), and acting out of nothing more than instincts she can neither hope, nor care to understand. The lights are on and nobody's home.

Her last, blissful smile as she enters one of the waking dream-states that pervade the film masks the hollowness of a human being squeezed dry of all her humanity by a life of denial, guilt, and empty materialism.

It's an emotional sucker punch - a romantic banality that underscores with bitter irony what a sad, empty life Severine has, and the great damage that has been done to her. The tremendous harm that her own actions have caused by this point is just a tragic ricochet.

All in all, Belle de Jour is a haunting piece of classic cinema. It may be Bunuel's masterpiece. It belongs in any serious movie fan's collection.