 Starring: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Genevieve Page
Director: Luis Bunuel
Year Of Release: 1967
Plot: Severine is a closeted, bourgeois housewife who has difficulty relating her real desires to her loving but staid husband. Prone to having fantasies about sadomasochism, she is intrigued when she hears an acquaintance is a prostitute, and decides to become one herself, under the name Belle De Jour. However while her liaisons with a young, dangerous gangster excite her, it could lead to tragedy. |
I was wondering while I was re-watching Belle De Jour, what someone would think if they came to the movie cold, knowing nothing about it at all. It’s a movie that’s renowned for its eroticism, even though it’s doesn’t actually show you an awful lot, but it’s not a simple film to understand.
The movie opens with a man and women driving along in a carriage. They stop and the man drags the woman out, ties her up and gets his footman to start whipping her (which she seems to enjoy), before allowing the servants to have their way with her. It’s all a bit peculiar, but then the film suddenly cuts to the same woman, but now in bed, and it comes to seem as if the sadomasochism was merely her fantasy.
The film contains several more of Severine’s fantasies of debasement, but Belle De Jour’s peculiarities don’t end there. Sometimes during her erotic encounters Severine hears a bell chiming, but what does it mean? We never find out. An Asian man turns up at the brothel where Severine works with a strange buzzing box. One of the prostitutes looks inside, seems shocked and refuses to go off with the man. He then goes to a room with Severine and shows his box to her. After this the film cuts to later the same, the man has gone and Severine is lying on the bed. What was in the box? Did Severine do anything with the man? We never really know.
However, perhaps the most puzzling part of the movie is the ending. (Slight, sort of spoilers ahead) The last few moments of the film could be another fantasy (although of a different kind to the ones we’ve seen before). Alternatively it could suggest the whole film has gone on in Severine’s head and this is the only real moment we’ve seen, or it could be that the events of the movie have shifted the balance of power in the relationship between husband and wife, and Severine has moved from desiring to be dominated, to wanting a strange sort of control over her husband.
We never really find out which one is true (and there are other possible interpretations as well, mainly centred on what is real in the film and what isn’t), but each is plausible following what we’ve already seen, and each furthers the ideas the movie has been playing with. It’s a clever and deliberately enigmatic ending that isn’t meant to have a definitive solution.
If you watch the film knowing a bit about its eccentricities, particularly that it was directed by Luis Bunuel, who started his career as an avowed surrealist, all of these odd moments work in context. We don’t need to know what the slightly surreal ringing bell or strangely acting cats mean, as it’s just meant to be suggestive of the very individual things that people attach erotic meaning to. Severine owns her own desires, so it’s not our job to know the specific reasons why. Indeed, she may not know herself. Likewise with the buzzing box, it is represents the man’s secret personal turn on, whatever that may be. Even the enigmatic ending plays with the themes of the films, toying with fantasy and reality and how they interplay. It’s about how what you desire can change, and whether reality can ever live up to your fantasies.
It is a wonderful movie, but only in context.
However, I can’t help but think that if you came to the movie cold and knew nothing about what you were going to watch, Belle De Jour would seem frustrating, confusing, a little pretentious and the ending could have you throwing things at the screen. The film only works if you know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s the same with quite a lot of art films, some of which are immensely annoying unless you’re aware of the context of how you’re meant to view them.
The question then becomes whether a film should be able to stand on its own without a viewer knowing anything about it beforehand (or at least without them already being aware of the devices the film is going to use, such as surrealism in Belle De Jour). While the knee-jerk answer is that yes they should, I would actually say no.
It’s a particular issue with Belle De Jour, because if the film had to explain itself and the way it works to the audience, it wouldn’t succeed in the way it does. For example you couldn’t have the opening fantasy, which in many ways is the key to the entire film. It would be a very different movie that wouldn’t work half as well as it does – but it only works at all as long as you understand the context before you start watching it.
While the issue of the audience already needing to know something about how the movie will work before they watch it, often comes up with art films (largely because they are often a lot more difficult to access than more mainstream movies), the fact is, it’s true of all films.
Mainstream movie marketing campaigns aren’t just about making you aware a film exists, they’re about creating a context for you to understand the movie before you watch it. Hollywood knows that more important to the marketing of a movie than the film itself, is the ideas they attach to it (e.g. the genre, what films it’s like, whether its intelligent or purely escapist, etc.), as that what gets people into the cinema. It’s one of the reasons Paramount made Transformers rather than creating their own original giant robots, because the whole history of the toys, cartoons and comics creates a powerful context for people to understand the film version (indeed part of the power of brands is the meaning and feelings companies carefully attach to them).
Hollywood also knows that making sure people are aware of exactly what they’re going to watch before they go to the cinema, is vital for later positive word of mouth. There have been studies into how people react to films, which found that if you tell a test subject they’re going to watch a rom-com (for example), but then show them a drama, they’re more likely to dislike it than if you tell them the correct genre beforehand. The reason for this is that as soon as you give people the context through which to view something, that’s how they subconsciously judge it. Even if the drama is a great film in its own right, if it doesn’t match what they were expecting, it tends to get a worse mark.
However an even more interesting finding is that if you tell a test subject they’re going to watch a rom-com and then show them a rom-com, they’re more likely to enjoy it than if you show them the same thing but don’t tell them anything about what they’re going to watch beforehand.
It just goes to show that even in the most mainstream of genres, where it wouldn’t seem that knowing what you’re getting beforehand would make any difference to whether you’ll like it or not, having prior awareness of the context of the film is still important.
It may be more acute with films like Belle De Jour, simply because the movie doesn’t work in a way that’s easy to understand, but it’s vital with all film (and all art for that matter).
I really would recommend you go out and watch Belle De Jour, because it is a fascinating, erotic and endlessly thought provoking movie. Bunuel’s movie is essentially the film Eyes Wide Shut wishes it could have been, and one of the few films that manages to successfully get inside the very personal idiosyncrasies of sex, eroticism and love, and the difference between the three. Hopefully now I’ve given you a little bit of context, you’ll be able to watch it without getting so frustrated with its oddities that you’ll end up breaking the TV.
TIM ISAAC
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