Belle de jour

Belle de jour is a 1967 French film directed by Mexican-Spanish Luis Buñuel, based on the homonymous novel by Argentine-French director Joseph Kessel. Belle de nuit” in French is a euphemistic expression to refer to a prostitute in politically correct language. Also, "belle de jour" is the name of a plant, the morning glory, whose flowers only open during the day: Kessel plays with the meanings of those words.

Skeptical about the cinematographic possibilities of the novel, Luis Buñuel agreed to take it to the big screen on the condition that he be given complete freedom to make the adaptation. He won a Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival.

Plot

This film practically begins with a sadomasochistic scene in which the beautiful Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is tied to a tree and there she is harassed and whipped by several men, she suffers and enjoys almost at the same time.

Séverine is a woman who is married to a doctor whom she loves but with whom she is unable to maintain an intimate relationship. She has erotic thoughts and fantasies, until one day she goes to a brothel and starts working there in the evenings while keeping herself chaste in her marriage.

Reality presents us with the bourgeois life of Severine (Catherine Deneuve). She is married to a man (Jean Sorel) who is the epitome of individual consummation, of success. And besides perfection, he is also a symbol of protection. He is so kind and kind, so perfect, that he cannot satisfy the most hidden desires of his wife. Her perfection is an obstacle for her that inhibits her desire.

Severine enjoys all the desirable goods: food, clothing, travel,... but it is precisely that comfort, that "normality" the one that subjugates her. The routine has come to annul her being, which since childhood has been punished by the social order, by morality and by religion. That oppression has generated in her traumas that little by little and through flashbacks are discovered throughout the film.

As for desire, it causes Severine an internal disorder that clashes with the pre-established external order in which she lives: that is where the conflict that sets the plot in motion occurs. Belle de jour is the story of a search, of a journey inside a masochistic woman obsessed with feeling possessed, desired. And that desire to be desired, despite its redundancy, is so strong that it affects the woman's own will and leads her to that game, to that double life. The risk and danger, both social and physical or moral, that becoming a prostitute entails excites her and takes her out of her monotony of life.

But also, what she really longs for is to feel possessed, dominated. Such is the intensity of her goal that it pushes her to overcome her fears, her shyness and her moral self-censorship and, rather quickly, she learns to behave, speak and move like a professional. Perhaps already reaching an extreme in which what Severine really wants is to feel public, a woman of many, an object of transgression. For this reason she even allows herself to be whipped.

Prostituting herself seems to be the remedy for her "tortured childhood. Reality is mixed in the film with memories in which Severine is groped by an adult. It is definitely a trauma. There are also scenes in which she imagines that she is currently being raped or that she is fornicating under a restaurant table with a friend of her husband's whom she hates because he always shows special interest in her. All this alternation of sequences, with different temporal references, help to build Severine's troubled past and which is the cause of her current interior loss.

You can see how Buñuel tries to recreate a feeling of subversion. The following pairings stand out:

• The "impersonality" of the clients of the brothel in front of the archetype represented by Severine's husband.

• Prostitution as a pseudo or false liberation to Severine's bourgeois life, although in the real Severine only repeats child trauma with hysteria attitudes.

Undoubtedly contrasts that reinforce the idea that Severine's prostitution and her evolution as a character, give the story the character of an initiation journey. In addition, the viewer himself will not be the same when he finishes watching the film. On Severine's trip, the introduction to the world of the brothel is first, with her rules. The character has preconceived ideas about this environment that may be confirmed or corrected. From madam "Anaís" (Geneviève Page) receives the necessary briefing. Note that it is precisely she who says that what Severine needs is a "strong hand", just the opposite of what her husband offers her. As she receives clients and gains experience thanks to their submission to her, it seems that her state of mind evolves favorably. Her growth in her fantasy will make her happier in reality. Like real life, the brothel fantasy and childhood memories are articulated and make Severine's desire and character evolve.

But to prevent this triangle from spinning indefinitely, Buñuel provokes a situation in the plot that closes it parallel to its opening: the husband's friend (Michel Piccoli), who provocatively and intentionally gave Severine the address of the brothel to satisfy the curiosity she felt after a conversation they had had, and it can be considered that she had ignited the fuse of her desire, is the one who, in an unexpected visit to the brothel, meets Severine and makes the two of them meet. worlds in which the protagonist moved, the real and the fantastic, and that until now had followed parallel trajectories, converge in time and space.

Reality and personal fantasy collide and destabilize the character. He has such a need to live that duality that he even offers himself so that this man, whom he despises so much, fornicates her in exchange for keeping silence. Offering that should not be interpreted as a sacrifice, since she herself desires it deep inside her as she appears in one of the & # 34; sequences & # 34; frequent dreamlike in the film.

This conjunction of parallel lives will cause Severine to leave the brothel. Her real life is more powerful, but she cannot appease desire in such a simple way and proof of this is that one of the elements belonging to the & # 34; fantasy & # 34; de Severine transgresses the border and passes from one world to the other. It is about the gangster who had taken a fancy to her in her brothel. He goes to visit her at her house, blackmails her into returning to her "fantastic world". At this point there is a struggle between desire and reason. The end of the film ends up confirming the unreality of her own construction: the gangster (Pierre Clémenti) leaves Severine and waits for her husband to return. He then shoots and wounds him. He then runs away and, chased by the police, ends up dying.

It could be interpreted that, a priori, and by means of the sacrifice that was paid through the meretricio (and the wounded husband), reason has triumphed over jouissance. And even noticing that the new situation, in which Severine has to take care of a husband who is no longer perfect, is a clear improvement in her state of mind. However, the director is Buñuel and by no means will bourgeois comfort triumph over him. What happens when the husband suddenly gets up for a drink and Severine begins to hear the horses and carriage from the first sequence, the one in which she imagined (or remembered) being raped? What happens when she goes out on the balcony and we discover that they are no longer in the city but in a luxurious country mansion? According to the novel by the Argentine-French Kessel, the novel in question relates mainly to desire bastardized in compulsive and repetitive jouissance. In Buñuel's film it is evident that a woman's desire can be transformed into joy and hatred (who receives her good husband as a victim) since the woman has been used (historically) as an object no longer of desire but as a mere object. sexual and from which women driven from the macho unconscious to which they have been subjected have tried at least to get a profit by giving up their sex in exchange for power, for example in exchange for money.

Buñuel's intention may be to demonstrate that after a way of filming that some would dismiss as conventional, he is capable of creating a plot in which reality and fantasy are mixed. Likewise, he leads the viewer through the journey of the psychology of a character tormented by childhood traumas, by the society in which he lives and plagued by irrepressible joy. Undoubtedly, this film maintains some of the most classic constants of Buñuel's work, such as the subversive vision of the bourgeoisie until the middle of the XX century (in this regard, certain aspects of this film that were revulsive and even scandalously pornographic in that year of the previous century are trivialized today) since the current culture in force imposed from postmodernity makes such Film may seem something common from the rise of filmed prostitution that today is very common for mass consumption and, what seems more important: as the enslaved desire through jouissance, through the generation of a need, it becomes the engine that enslaves the individual and submits to his will.

Cast

• Catherine Deneuve... Séverine Serizy, alias Belle de Jour
• Jean Sorel... Pierre Serizy
• Michel Piccoli... Henri Husson
• Geneviève Page... Madame Anaïs
• Pierre Clémenti... Marcel
• Françoise Fabian... Charlotte
• Macha Méril... Renée
• Maria Latour... Mathilde
• Marguerite Muni... Pallas
• Francis Blanche... Monsieur Adolphe
• François Maistre... The Professor
• Georges Marchal... Duke
• Francisco Rabal... Hyppolite

Analysis

Using the camera

From the violence and rhythm that the filmmaker applied to the sequences of previous films, through the use of tracking shots, zooming in and focusing on symbolic objects, he proceeds to use in this film a much calmer filming technique but that, as a measure to counteract such a change, has within it a very turbulent dramatic structure caused by the feeling of subversive desire that plagues its characters, something that is constant in their films.

Directing actors

In addition, before highlighting the production carried out by the director in Belle de jour, we must pay attention to his work with the actors, who have the right expressiveness, sometimes tending towards hieraticism. This economy of the gesture will serve to highlight the importance of the look that, in this way, acquires two meanings: on the one hand, it is a way of conveying or expressing the inner desire that grows and, on the other, it denotes the personal loss to which the character faces.

The three constants on which the plot is built are: · Reality · Fantasy generated by jouissance · Memory induced by inner trauma.

Legacy

In 2006, Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira released the film "Belle Toujours," which represents a symbolic sequel to the film, depicting an imagined future encounter between the characters of Séverine and Henri Husson, protagonists of the original work.

In 2010, Empire magazine ranked it 56th on its list of the 100 Greatest Films Worldwide.