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I love Love LOVE LOVE Belle de Jour! Haters, be damned. I know this is viewed by lots as minor Buñuel, but this film actually erased or clarified my previous qualms about his signature symbolism and surrealism. Belle de Jour worked for me. And it worked perfectly!

I thought that Buñuel was in full command of the medium here. Whereas I could not gloss over his usual conceits in Viridiana (for example), I think they suited Belle de Jour perfectly well. He moved the film forward and he did it with panache. Catherine Deneuve is immaculate in her role as the lonely wife-turned-prostitute Severine who harbours masochistic and humiliation fantasies. Critics may argue that this was a misogynistic treatment of her character. But I never felt that way. Indeed, I felt the other way around. Because she was trapped in her ennui, in the all too familiar banality of her bourgeois existence, she sought her own liberation (sexual and personal) by being in control of her life.

Prostitution was less of a point and more of a metaphor. It was this control that she had that allowed here to blossom. Even in small scenes where Severine was just playing or chatting with the other working girls, one could feel the palpable joy in her eyes. She was free and she had company. Indeed, life is not merely about possessions (she had lots based on scenes filmed in her home), it is about the people around us and how we interact with them. Even her encounters with the various customers, however bizarre, have more “life” than her life at home. Buñuel indeed films these scenes with such compassion and honesty but also with such audacity and bluntness; no wonder this film made waves during the Venice film festival that year (even winning the Golden Lion)!

It is just too tragic that in this film, the rest of the world could not keep up. This was symbolized by all her fantasies featuring the men wearing Victorian era costumes. There was her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) who was blind to her demands and also to her needs. There was her gangster lover Marcel (Paul Clémenti) whose naivety caused everyone dearly. He was kinda hot but his stupidity was astounding (Buñuel does a perfect joke on our fantasies of love with this character). And speaking of jokes, I thought that there were lots of inside jokes (or parodies) poked at Godard especially Breathless. There is the announcement from a seller shouting “New York Herald Tribune!” (Saint Jean!!!). And that street shooting purely channels Jean-Paul Belmondo’s final scene. I think only Michel Piccoli’s character Henri understood Severine’s plight but even he was ultimately constricted by the prevailing social conventions.

Belle de Jour comes in full circle at the end. Reality and fantasy collide in such a heartbreaking sequence. With her husband paralyzed, Severine makes one last fantasy – that of a happy relationship with her husband – this time stripped of sexual tones. The scene was just pure and sincere. I got overwhelmed. I cried during this part. I had been completely sold on this film early on but this perfect denouement nailed it perfectly for me. In this film, Buñuel successfully weaves the “real” and the “dream” into one lucid filmic existence. Just as Juliet of the Spirits (which has lots of parallels with Belle de Jour I might add) completely sold me on Fellini after my initial indifference to 8½ (I have since re-assessed it), Belle de Jour is my own epiphany (OMG Christmas!) on the endearing genius of this other surrealist master!

Luis Bunuel’s famous bourgeois erotic drama still has the ability to shock, but not like it did in 1967, when seeing beautiful, virginal Catherine Deneuve get horse-whipped by stage drivers, or spattered with mud by her husband in self-pleasing dream sequences, was quite the scandal. Today we marvel at Bunuel’s pure mastery of the cinematic form, telling a story about a repressed woman’s desire for sexual exploration in a Parisian whorehouse, with only the sharpest wit and satire to fall back on, suggesting through brief memory flashbacks (and those famous erotic dream sequences) the guilt and ways of Deneuve’s psyche. Bunuel would flower this style to even greater heights in his following French films, especially the surreal “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”, but this remains a linchpin in his canon.

French language director Luis Buñuel is a master at cinematic surrealism. After seeing his masterpiece Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie in film history class during college, I had been intrigued to seek out and see more from him. So, when the Sundance Channel recently aired Belle de jour I took the plunge. While at first glance it seems we have a straightforward narrative, it all soon unravels. The first glimpse of our main character, Séverine, occurs during a masochistic nightmare (or maybe welcome dream as we might later discern) where her husband betrays her on a coach ride through the woods. She awakens in bed, where we discover she has had dreams like this before. All this is in a linear stream until we soon get a lightning quick cut to a scene of a little girl being sexually advanced on by an older man. Could this be a memory of Séverine’s childhood? or maybe just another puzzle piece leading us astray. Either way one thinks, he/she is in for a ride of reality and fantasy melding together, eventually becoming one and the same, where at the finish of the film no one will know what actually happened, if anything at all.

Our lead is played magically by Catherine Deneuve who’s striking in beauty as well as dramatic chops. Deneuve may be the most beautiful woman put to film that I have seen. She is not just a pretty face, however, as her angelic features are needed to juxtopose herself against the brothel lifestyle she soon enters. While cold to her husband physically, although we are shown signs she really does love him, she seems to open up completely during her escapades at the Madame’s underground whorehouse. At first she shies away from the intimate contact, but soon is reveling in the embarrassment as she’s dominated by her male suitors. The “nightmares” sprinkled throughout, then, could be pleasant dreams, as maybe she wants her husband to demean her and treat her as an object like those that she sees during the day. She superimposes the brutality on her husband in her thoughts because that is what she really desires.

Along with Deneuve, we are treated with many great performances, including her husband’s friend Hussan played by Michel Piccoli who plays the part with great duplicity. He is a man that Séverine despises yet her husband finds hilarious. An integral part of the film, Hussan could be construed as the conductor of the events at hand. He puts the idea of prostitution into Séverine’s head and ultimately gets the ball rolling for what the movie’s climax holds in store. Pierre Clémenti also does a wonderful job as Marcel, a regular customer of “Belle de jour” and the complete manifestation of everything she wants her husband to be. His brutality and emotion form a great edge to his character as you never know what he will do next. Marcel is constantly on the fence of keeping himself in check or totally losing his mind.

Belle de jour is a journey into the psyche of our main character. We see her fantasies, her nightmares, her thoughts, and the horrors that all hold in store for her. She lives dangerously close to disaster, but seems to enjoy the possibility that she will be caught or hurt. The excitement is what she is really after. There are many ways to interpret a film of this kind and all are probably correct. Buñuel has created a template for thought and discussion. One leaves his films with a feeling of disorientation, much like that contained by his characters, yet also a desire to crack the code to the mystery. This is cinema at its best; an intelligent story that challenges the viewer and doesn’t allow for the banal passivity that many movies churned out by Hollywood do today.