CRITERION REVIEW: #593 BELLE DE JOUR (dir. Luis Buñuel) 1967
#593 BELLE DE JOUR (dir. Luis Buñuel) 1967
THE FILM: There’s a humility inherent to Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour that immediately isolates it from the rest of his work. Made in 1967 in the wake of Simon of the Desert — a film so angry that it burns through its own rage in a scant 45 minutes — Belle de Jour is positioned at the last pivotal fulcrum of Buñuel’s career, the project with which he began to temper the sociopolitical fury that characterized earlier work like The Exterminating Angel with a degree of awe and mystery. The softening wouldn’t last (his final film,The Obscure Object of Desire, ends in a plume of fire), but in Catherine Deneuve’s mercilessly perfect flesh he encountered an object that eluded the ire of his understanding, a dull and perfectly blank face that kept human desire submerged beneath a glimmering surface like an iceberg. A sex iceberg (*hold for Pulitzer*).
Séverine Serizy: By night a bored bourgeoise housewife with a lame but functional marriage. By day, a high-end prostitute with a penchant for punishment and humiliation. Buñuel, who was compelled by Freud but ultimately scoffed at the totality of his conclusions, had by 1967 already made a career of exploring the facets of human nature that society felt compelled to ignore or extinguish, but with Belle de Jour he finally found a character unfit for his particular brand of torture, as she would have enjoyed it too much. We meet Séverine through her fantasies, as she’s strung up to a tree and raped by her husband’s carriage drivers. The steely young blonde enjoys imagining herself subjugated to such violations, her psyche’s resistance to a life soured and streamlined by a rigid society. She yearns for the upheaval that Buñuel typically visited upon his characters, and so the subversive iconoclast responds by transforming Séverine into Belle de Jour, a creature who is a fantasy, herself. The lines between her reality and her dreams for it are too blurred for Buñuel to navigate with his usual indignant precision, and so instead he shifts his focus away from how desire informs, to how it persists, festers, and takes over.
Shot in the soft and centered fashion that Buñuel so often relied upon in order to prioritize his ideas over his aesthetics, Belle de Jour is nevertheless among the filmmaker’s most fetching works — erotic in a way that seems incapable of modern cinema, tawdry in the way that defines it, and eventually willing to sacrifice its momentum for mystery as it comes full circle. Channeling everything from Charade to Le Samouraï in an effort to confuse its own nature (and inspiring Mulholland Drive, it would seem), Belle de Jour hasn’t aged a day, its perversities too human to ever be reduced to kitsch. It’s not Buñuel’s best, and its simpler moments betray his disinterest, but the film remains a perfect testament as to why sex and Buñuel are two of the only things that will always make sense of why we don’t.
THE TRANSFER: The most beautiful Criterion transfer of the month, the Belle de Jour Blu-ray is saturated to a rather extreme degree that I happen to really enjoy (mileage may vary). I find that the heightened hues call attention to the conflicting dimensions at the heart of this film, and the consistent veneer of unreality suits Séverine’s sexual limbo. Detail is magnificent, and the grain is modest but satisfyingly filmy.
THE SPECIAL FEATURES: First and foremost is a commentary by film historian Michael Wood, which is a dryly analytical example of how a track can be enervated by a speaker who is a little bit too ensconced in the material. Wood knows his stuff, I mean the guy literally wrote the BFI book on the film, but while this may not be Last Year at Marienbad, it’s still a film that rewards free-association and a flexibility of thought, and the commentary feels a bit too cut-and-dry. I wouldn’t wish it away, but ideally it would have been complimented by a second, looser track. Also included is an exclusive 10-minute interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, in which a great deal is revealed about Buñuel’s idiosyncratic methods.
THE BEST BIT: My favorite thing on the disc is an 18-minute video essay starring “sexual-politics activist” Susie Bright, who focuses this no-holds barred look at the film through a very particular lens. Bright is fiercely intelligent, and should effectively unmoor any readings of the film that have become a bit too settled and secure.
THE ARTWORK: Wooooow. The stunningly evocative cover art comes courtesy of artist David Downton (no relation to the Abbey), whose work has previously graced the Criterion release of Lola Montes. A flowing portrait of Deneuve painted with thick brushstrokes and bisected by a black / white median that both underlines and mocks the film’s illusory moral divide, this is a perfect distillation of Belle de Jour, and the early frontrunner for the year’s best Criterion cover art.
THE VERDICT: 87 / 100
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