Belle de Jour (1966) is Luis Bunuel's classic story of the masochistic fantasies and casual descent into whoredom of Severine (Catherine Deneuve), a beautiful but bored representative of the haute bourgeoisie. Out of circulation for many years, the film has been rereleased through the efforts of Martin Scorsese. With its exhaustive catalog of perversions, stinging anti-clericalism, and bracing attack on the beautiful surface of Catherine Deneuve, the resurrection of Belle de Jour is welcome indeed.
The film opens with the first of many fantasy sequences, which the director signals with the sound of carriage bells. In this scene we see Severine and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) enjoying an apparently innocent ride through a forest in autumn. Inexplicaply, Pierre hands over his wife to two thuggish coachmen, who tie her up and rape her.
The film interspaces scenes of seeming domestic tranquility with Severine's lurid fantasies of degradation. On the surface her life is perfect; she is almost disturbingly beautiful, rich, and coveted by their friends. Her husband is handsome, kind, and patient with his wife's apparent frigidity. During a discussion of brothers, a family friend mentions a particular address, to which Severine--in glamorous '60s couture and sunglasses--pays a visit. There she meets Anais (Genevieve Page), an intelligent madame who operates a discreet whorehouse out of what appears to be a fashionable address. Severine is both appalled and seduced by the world of prostitution and tries to limit her involvement to a few hours in the afternoon, inspiring Anais to call her "Belle de Jour."
Bunuel constanly plays with audience expectations as he pressents sequences that may or may not be occuring outside Severine's head. In one of these, an aging, refined nobleman asks Severine if she wants to participate in a "religious ceremony." Typical of the director, this turns out to be a fetishistic exercise in which she wears a flimsy, see-through moire gown and pretends to be dead in a coffin, while the count--who apparently has built a trap-door into the bottom of the coffin--ravages her from below. When he is finished, with her, his servant unceremoniously throws her out of the house in a storm.
Severine's experiences as a whore read like a primer from de Sade. Initially she is unsuccessful, rejected by a short, fat, middle-aged candy manufacturer and a masochistic gynecologist who demands a replacement when she fails to grasp how to discipline him. But her look of "class" makes her one of Anais' most popular girls, and the madame regrets that Severine can only offer her services during the afternoon. Bunuel lovingly details her trysts with a huge Japanese businessman who tries to pay for her with a "Geisha Card," and a sleazy, gold-toothed gangster named Marcel (Pierre Clementi), to whom she--seemingly--becomes attached. A lesbian infatuation by Anais is hinted out, to which Severine--in this and all else in the film--is indifferent.
Marcel provides the jolt of lust she seems to need, but she is unable to contain the relationship when he demands to see her more often and eventually tries to claim her by killing her husband. In spite of the "beautiful" trappings of glamorous interiors, haute couture, and a star noted for her "class," Bunuel has not abandoned his earlier social protest approach (Los Olvidados, Land without Bread); he shows decisively the slumming mentality of his rich heroine, how she wants the pleasures of the sex and class demi-monde but refuses to get emotionally involved. Her ultimate refusal to leave the confines of her bourgeois apartment and what it represents (a loveless marriage) is one of the director's strongest statements on the hollow lives of the rich. And in Belle de Jour he specifically attacks his leading lady's glamorous surface: in one of the fantasy sequences Pierre and the two coachmen hurl mud at her while yelling "dung devourer!"
Belle de Jour's payoffs are many, particularly at a time when the "dumbing down" of the culture is so thorough that the phrase has become a catchword. Some viewers will be put off by the sheer meanness of Bunuel's treatment of Deneuve; some (if not all!) will be confused by the interplay between the narrative and fantasies. But anyone who's sick of watching talking pigs, Indians in cupboards, mall-rats in King Arthur's court, and other such nonsense will find pleasure in the very adult surprises of this film.