First, let’s rep something straight: Belle de Jour was shot 35 years ago in France. It’s honest not ever going to see as tidy, challenging, and saturated as a newer movie. Director Martin Scorsese (who spearheaded its re-release) is a purist; he would not want to artificially “enhance” the relate at the risk of distorting Luis Bunuel’s new vision.
Second, this DVD is non-anamorphic for very expedient reason: Belle de Jour was photographed in 1.66:1 widescreen. 16:9 enhancement would actually have Slit OFF some of the narrate at the top and bottom. People who complain about the quality of this DVD simply don’t know what they’re talking about.
As for the movie itself, Belle de Jour is one of the few films about eroticism that really gets it good – it knows that eroticism is in the mind, not the body. The always shining Catherine Deneuve plays Severine – a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and fundamentally empty. She is married to a valid provider, the magnificent but wearisome Pierre (Jean Sorel), and enjoys all the lazy upper-middle class accouterments.
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But something is depraved in this greeting-card perfect world. Severine seems to rep erotic satisfaction only in the repressed desire to be humilated and broken-down sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and mosey to trees. This lurid fantasy life leads her to peek employment as a part-time prostitute – but only during the day, before her husband gets home.
Complications arise when her double life is discovered by her husband’s friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), and when she finds herself the subject of a stalker – a dangerously obsessed customer named Marcel (Pierre Clementi), who also happens to be a violence-prone thief.
Though it sounds like fodder for a typical Hollywood “erotic thriller”, what develops from these elements is a psychological watch that, for all its depths, appears to remain moot about fair what makes the main character tick.
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Central to the film is Deneuve’s work. Under Luis Bunuel’s trusty, disciplined direction, she delivers a performance that is wintry, opaque, and ultimately heartbeaking. Yes, she seems distant, and that is precisely the point: the noteworthy talked-about ending, by its very ambiguity, shocks us with the revelation that we’ve been fooled all along. Severine is not unreadable because she is hiding murky motivations. Rather, she is a dreamy, empty vessel; abused as a child (as we watch in subtle flashbacks), and acting out of nothing more than instincts she can neither hope, nor care to understand. The lights are on and nobody’s home.
Her last, cheerful smile as she enters one of the waking dream-states that pervade the film masks the hollowness of a human being squeezed dry of all her humanity by a life of denial, guilt, and empty materialism.
It’s an emotional sucker punch – a romantic banality that underscores with bitter irony what a dim, empty life Severine has, and the tall injure that has been done to her. The vast afflict that her contain actions have caused by this point is unbiased a tragic ricochet.
All in all, Belle de Jour is a haunting share of classic cinema. It may be Bunuel’s masterpiece. It belongs in any serious movie fan’s collection.
“Belle de Jour” is generally considered to be director Luis Bunuel’s masterpiece; a surprisingly revealing and seemingly personal venture into the world of eroticism and its deviances. It’s a truly surrealistic employ in ambiguity, fantasy, and reality. The line that separates them is blurred so remarkable that the famously mysterious ending has had critics arguing for decades over its meaning.
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The fantasy sequences are usually signalled by the sound of carriage bells, but by the destroy of the film the viewer is no longer able to differentiate between what is another one of Severine’s fantasies and what is reality. Even Bunuel admitted to not shining himself. He said that “by the kill, the steady and imaginary fuse; for me they fabricate the same thing.”
The ravishing Catherine Deneuve, ravishing in her cool prime, portrays Severine Sevigny, the middle-class wife of Pierre, a doctor. She is cold, virginal, yet seemingly gratified enough in her bourgeoisie life and its trappings. However, upon hearing about a local clandestine brothel from a friend, she pays a visit to the madame, and becomes a prostitute, going by the name of “Belle de Jour”, as she can only work in the afternoons. She apparently fully realizes and enjoys her sexuality, despite her guilty conscience, exclaiming that she “can’t abet it”. She certainly doesn’t need the money. She’s bored with her life and her marriage, needing a “firm hand” to lead her; a need which the madame, Anais, who is obviously attracted to her, almost immediately recognizes. Her sweet and worn husband is unaware, treating her powerful like a child, and the audience cannot relieve but have that even if he knew of her right nature, he would not understand or empathize. She keeps her two worlds neatly separate until a patron of hers (whom she herself enjoys) becomes obsessed with her, and all is threatened.
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That Alfred Hithcock in particular admired this film comes as no surprise to me; Deneuve would have been the perfect Hitchcock heroine: an frosty blonde who becomes “a whore in the bedroom”, as Hitchock was fond of saying he preferred in his leading ladies. But this say is not meant to simplfy the memoir, its telling, or Deneuve’s worthy performance, which is what truly draws the viewer into the film.
“Belle de Jour” was Bunuel’s first foray into the consume of color, and he employed it to huge finish. From the tumble colors displayed in the landscape scenes, to the subtle shades in Deneuve’s clothing, the contrasts are position. While the world around her explodes in blooming hues, Deneuve’s character is defined by her couture, if staid, wardrobe of tan, dismal, and white.
“Belle de Jour” was unreleased for many years due to copyright problems, but finally re-released in 1995 through the efforts of director Martin Scorcese, and released on DVD in 2003. I’ve watched it twice in the past week and am collected at a loss to represent it very well; suffice to say that I am in alarm. It’s an amazingly erotic film without any explicitness, and one that I demand hasn’t lost any of its attain over the years. As the subject matter is handled very tactfully and without any loyal sex scenes; a grand deal is left to the viewer’s imagination – which only serves the heighten the mysteries inherent at every turn in the film. The viewer is however drawn into the sense of feeling to be a voyeur into Severine’s secret life; the careful choreography of scenes and camera angles contribute to the dismal sense of intrusion by us, the viewers.
There are many sub-stories and runt mysteries in the film; for instance one of the most widely debated upon by critics is the mystery of “what is in the Asian client’s exiguous box? ” that he presents first to one prostitute, who posthaste refuses, then to Severine, who tentatively agrees. All the audience know is that it’s something with a insect-like noise, and when the client leaves, Severine is sprawled face-down upon the bed, the sheets thrown about, and obviously joyful with whatever took site in the interim.
“Belle de Jour” was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, as well as the award for Best Foreign Film in 1968 from the Original York Film Critics Circle.
Interesting side notes: Bunuel himself had a shoe fetish, which helps define the numerous shots of Deneuve’s beautifully clad feet throughout the film, and the fact that every time she goes shopping, she buys shoes. He also appears in the film in a cameo as a cafe patron, and in another scene his hands are shown loading a gun.
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