Voyeuristic surrealism: Bunuel’s "Belle de Jour" (1967)

     The movie features Catherine Deneuve, as a woman who spends her days as a prostitute while her husband is at work. Belle de Jour blooms like a flower only during the day. Bunuel subverts reality by creating a character whose emotional isolation makes “everyday life” as remote and fantastic as a dream. In the opening scene, Deneuve imagines herself and her husband riding through the woods in a landau, we hear carriage bells queuing off her decent into a sexual fantasy of being flogged by her employees. CUT. We see the married couple in the bedroom, and Pierre asks her lovingly what she was dreaming of. She replies in a congenial way— serving both his need for reality and her desire for fantasy—“I was thinking of us.”

     The plot is quickly told, Séverine is a young, beautiful housewife who daydreams about losing herself in submission such as floggings and bondage. She is married to Pierre a doctor whom she admires, but cannot share physical intimacy with him. A friend, Monsieur Husson, (Michel Piccoli) mentions a high-class brothel to her, and she secretly starts to work at the brothel during the afternoons. Séverine will only work from two to five o'clock each day, returning in time to her husband. Séverine becomes entangled with Marcel, a young gangster, who offers her the thrills and excitement contained in her fantasies. But Marcel becomes increasingly demanding, and jealous of her husband Pierre. Eventually he visits her, and threatens to reveal her secret life, but Séverine persuades him to leave. Marcel waits outside for her husband and shoots him three times. Pierre survives the event, but turns blind and confined to a wheelchair.

     At the end, Husson visits their residence, and explains that Pierre must be ashamed of his dependence on her, and that knowledge of her exploits will no doubt hurt him but also help him. “After that,” Housson adds in a wonderful mixture of delicate sadism and acute moral insight, “who will be able to say that I’m a cruel person?” Is he really a cruel person? Or, has he found what could be considered as an altruistic use for his cruelty?

     The film ends when Houssin has told Pierre about her life as a prostitute, and Séverine retreats into fantasy again. With the knowledge Pierre has regained his moral superiority and with it the power of isolating Séverine. Thus he becomes “revived” in her eyes, and her guilt feelings drive her back to masochism. While Pierre no longer feels like a burden, it give Séverine the desired punishment from a man she couldn’t desire before. In the final sequence, Pierre is shown healthy, they kiss before looking out the window on to the opening scene of the film, only this time the carriage sounds changed.