Belle de Jour

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source: Belle de Jour

Belle de jour

I've just been reading several of the comments on this film - as I invariably do before adding my own - and the thing that comes across most strongly is a need for deep analysis that I am unable to share because frankly I don't CARE enough about the characters, plot, etc, to waste good analysis on it. Yes, it was pleasant to watch, some of the set-ups had their moments but all in all it was like the box that the Asian punter had with him. We never find out what was in it and we never will and the chances are it was as empty as this film and the buzzing sound existed only on the sound track just as any ultimate meaning exists only in Bunuel's head. If you've got 100 minutes to spare check it out but if it's a choice between this and Batman go with the guy in the cape.

Here's another one of those "shocking" movies of yesteryear that is absolutely nothing now.....just mainly boring. You wonder what the fuss was all about. The critics all called it "erotic." I call it "boring." Judge for yourself. This is a story about a wife who becomes a prostitute secretly for several hours each afternoon. In the first hour of this film, I saw no nudity, almost no profanity and, quite frankly, was so bored with the story that I lost interest in watching the last 40 minutes. Catherine Deenuve's beautiful face, even with those awful overdone 1960s fake eyelashes, was about the only thing I enjoyed in here.

A woman is frigid and won't have sex with her husband, probably because she was molested as a child. So she goes to a psychiatrist to get help, right? Wrong! She decides to go to work in a whorehouse, where turning a few tricks in the afternoon is just the therapy she needs, especially since all her customers are kinky and twisted. Of course, their perversions are only artificial movie perversions, not the sort of thing a prostitute would be likely to encounter on a daily basis in real life. Her husband still doesn't get any sex, though, because that just is not the way she loves him. One of her jealous customers shoots her husband anyway, leaving him mute, blind, crippled, and incapable of having sex. Now she has the perfect husband. But not for long. A friend of the family decides her husband will feel as though he is a burden on his virtuous wife, so he tells him that she is a prostitute. That way he won't feel so guilty. But wait. It was all just a dream. Fooled you.

Sèverine is perfect, she's Catherine Deneuve. She consciously inhabits her subconscious and the comings and goings are tinted with pristine, erotic decadence. Her perfection includes outrage without rage, panic without fear. Having or not having is the question she never asks. Her husband Pierre, the exquisite Jean Sorel, is like one of her garments. There, stunning, understated, reliable, existing without existing. Marcel, in the other hand, the riveting Pierre Clementi, seems determined to provoke. Provoke what? Where is that need creeping from? I love to meander through "Belle de Jour" allowing Luis Bunuel to have his fun. He deserves it. His puzzle is just that, a puzzle and his genius, challenge us to find the non existent pieces. The pieces are ours coming from our own wishes, wantings and longings.

Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, a bored middle-class woman who never slept with her handsome husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). She eventually adopts a double life on weekday afternoons as a hooker… Here she explores the depths of her desires with her amazing sexual inhibitions… Although the film resolves around her goings-on at a high-class brothel, real nudity and sex are never shown "Belle de Jour" may seem one of the most mysterious, poetic, and provoking films ever made… Producing a body of work unparalleled in its wealth of meaning and its ability to surprise and shock, Buñuel leads us into a new world arousing wonder and astonishment, depravity and pleasure, weird and entertaining