Belle de Jour

The movie that launched a thousand dubious blogs is back. 40 years after its original release Belle De Jour, the chronicles of a terrifically bored housewife, looks as elegantly depraved as ever. Other sexually charged films of a similar vintage may look hopelessly dated in an era when Google yields 92,400,000 results for porn, but Luis Buñuel’s 1967 fantasy has lost little of its disquieting charm. By turns amusing, sensual and creepy, the film stars Catherine Deneuve as Séverine Serizy, a young bride who is utterly frigid with her handsome doctor husband while entertaining wild daydreams of bondage and rape. Her obsessions lead to daytime work in a brothel where she accommodates the most repugnant johns before returning home to her blissfully unaware spouse in the evenings.
At the most superficial level, Belle De Jour is an abuse narrative. Molested as an eight year-old girl, Séverine is unable to experience sexual fulfillment unless brutality, mud, whips or a necrophiliac is involved. But Buñuel is far too playful to traumatise his audience with such a revelation. Belle De Jour is, in fact, untroubled by any psychology. Deneuve, never more faraway and frosty than here, puts in one of the great non-acting performances. A tabula rasa, she exists only to have her ridiculously perfect hair messed up and her classy YSL duds torn, all the while seeming far too in charge to be put upon in any way.
Her status as victim is further undermined by her unreliability. Every time one presumes to know the rules of the game, where fact ends and dubious masturbatory reverie begins, the director gleefully moves the goalposts. Just when you think that the heroine’s diseased fancies are signified by the appearance of bells and cats on the soundtrack, they’ll pop up where they ought not to be. The vast Asian gentleman caller rings bells as their session begins. Even odder is the strange whirring box, the Kiss Me Deadly suitcase of sex toys. If you weren’t already suspicious, the sly ambiguous ending casts doubt on everything that has gone before.
When the film was reissued by Miramax in the US in 1995, fantasy sections were indicated, in a monstrous cheat, by italicised subtitles. Happily, this print does not presume to ruin the entirely abstruse effect.