Review of Belle de Jour (1967) by Edith N — 04 Feb 2008

No one knows what the ending to this movie means. That isn't intended to be whimsical or sarcastic. It's quite serious. The director himself said he didn't know what it meant. I can only assume, were I to guess--and what is film criticism anyway but imposing your own view on things?--Severine (Catherine Deneuve), who has lived so much in her fantasy world throughout the film, is once again seeing what she wishes were true, only this time tied in with what she wishes she could have expressed before.

At its heart, this movie is about failure to communicate. The lovely Severine has intense, near-continual erotic fantasies that are far darker than she is comfortable expressing. In order to . . . well, there are a lot of reasons for it, but at any rate, she decides to go to work in a brothel. Since she can only work during the afternoon, she is called Belle du Jour, the beauty of the afternoon. (Apparently, this is also the French term for a daylily.) Her husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel), is fairly open about what he wants, but he still somehow fails to connect with his wife. I don't entirely blame him for this, as we'll get to in a moment, but it all goes into what I think of as important to a relationship. Throughout the film, we are suddenly dropped into Severine's fantasy world, and so far as we know, she never tells anyone about it, even though it's quite clearly shaping her life.

Actually, boys and girls, I'm currently reading a fascinating scholarly text on the history of the vibrator (really)*, and I think it deals with some of the same issues. Historically, women's sexuality has been unimportant to those who write the history. Severine cannot talk about her fantasies not least because it would have been so unusual to consider that a woman [i]had[/i] fantasies. I mean, okay, 1967 is hardly the dark ages, I grant you. However, it's about the same time that Masters and Johnson pretty much eliminated married women who didn't reach orgasm during intercourse from their studies, despite the fact that I'd think that'd be [i]exactly[/i] the kind of person that you wanted to know more about. Think about it this way--it's considered perfectly acceptable for the various men to patronize the brothel, but it would be utterly shocking to the woman's family and friends, as we indeed see in the case of Severine's own friend whose name I cannot remember, if it were to be discovered that she worked in the brothel herself. We are allowed into this world because it's considered erotic to us, presumably in part [i]because[/i] it's forbidden. Indeed, Husson (Michel Piccoli) flat-out tells her that he's no longer interested in her when he discovers that she is no longer pure. It's the Madonna-whore complex.

Let's talk about the word "frigid," in fact. In every summary I've seen of the movie, Severine is so described. However, I don't think we can know that at all. Did she have an orgasm during the entire course of the film? We simply don't know. There's no way to tell, though I'm actually [i]enormously[/i] grateful that we don't get much in the way of graphic imagery. Even Severine's fantasies are all about the foreplay. She doesn't seem particularly interested in sex with her husband until after she gets her, um, afternoon job, but can we really take that as evidence of frigidity? I assume, not without some justification, that the sex isn't really satisfactory to her since it isn't the kind of sex she's really into. So maybe she just finds [i]vanilla[/i] sex tedious and boring, and she wants her husband to . . . well, use your own imagination here, or examine the cinematic evidence. Further, we don't know that they [i]never[/i] have sex. We just know that, at least sometimes, she isn't interested. I highly doubt, for instance, that the marriage was never consummated.

As we covered while discussing [i]Last Tango in Paris[/i], Roger Ebert says that the great test of movies like this is, did it turn you on? However, this movie is not intended to turn [i]me[/i] on, because I'm a woman. Catherine Deneuve is a lovely, lovely woman--she's still gorgeous. I can certainly appreciate that. The other whores are . . . coarse; they know this, I think, and it's part of why they resent the elegant Severine. But I don't think any of the men are all that attractive, and I think the sexuality is very much intended to appeal to men. So no, actually, it [i]doesn't[/i] turn me on. Indeed, I think we've demonstrated that it makes me overthink things. Still, it is a lovely movie and a fascinating character study, and I recommend it on those grounds if no other.

*[i]The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction[/i], by Rachel P. Maines. From Johns Hopkins University Press, even.