Review of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) by Jason M — 16 Mar 2010

A maginificent erotic comedy. Bunuel directs with masterly assurance this icy comedy about a frigid housewife, Severine (Catherine Devenue) who goes to work at a Parisian brothel. Only here is she able to indulge in her masochistic desires by being forced to perform for her clientele. The sly joke is that her loving husband's patience and consideration is precisely NOT what she wants. She wants to keep her social respectability but needs the brothel as an outlet for her drives (Bunuel's point being the fairly well-worn one, even by that time, that bourgeois society has to suppress perversions and control female sexuality to maintain its power).

What's amazing is Bunuel's "respectable" treatment of this material. His cool and discrete approach brillantly contrasts with the frustrated sexual lives and fantasies we see on the screen. Brief nudity, no explicit sexual scenes, everything is done through inference and association. And what associations! Bunuel's playful surrealism is in full force here - witness the mysterious box - and his cast brings this eroticized world to life (along with Deneuve, the best performance comes from Genevieve Page as the most refined house madam you'll ever see). "Belle de Jour" is masterful piece of latter-day surrealism: it's a wonderful demonstration of the emotional anarchy at the root of sexual longing and the particularly tortured outlets people use to satisfy their needs. And yet the whole enterprise is discreetly charming - it's light at heart. This has to be the most elegantly dirty movie ever made.