Belle De Jour (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1967) - EveryFilmIWatch Review

Belle de Jour is the most obviously erotic of Luis Buñuel's body of work. Or I should say that it deals with eroticism in the most obvious way, since his usual underhand analysis of the human psyche is rarely far from dealing with the erotic and all that it encompasses. The film tells the story of a middle class housewife who, driven by a confused sense of longing and a taste for sadomasochism not shared by her dutiful spouse, voluntarily becomes a prostitute at a seedy brothel in Paris, assuming the alter ego of Belle de Jour.

Buñuel's piece sits strangely in history since, as a film of the 60s, its themes of liberation and sexual exploration are not all that surprising. And yet what it teaches us, particularly about female empowerment and the confusing sexualized machinations of the class system, feels fresh and revolutionary today, in our modern and supposedly enlightened society. For Belle, her desire to lose control of her body to the hands of Man – any man – is actually the fanciest piece of psychological footwork that one can imagine. Her world is dominated by men in positions of power. However, as a woman who derives pleasure from being dominated, she flips this power structure on its head: the men who tie her up and assault her are reduced to her servants. These are men so consumed by their basest desires that they are incapable of not doing her bidding.

Belle de Jour’s plot gets caught up in the practicalities of her double life and its inevitable consequences, which is disappointing and uncharacteristic of Buñuel, but he quickly recovers with a smart, if tragically revealing, ending. Catherine Deneuve portrays the oxymoronic nature of Belle's entirely controlled loss of control with grace, but grace saturated in an ungainly sense of vacancy, as if she could at any moment be fantasizing about some new scenario of sexual humiliation. It alarms and disarms the audience. I suspect this reflects Buñuel's desire to poke at the audience and demand that they don’t abandon the film, its insights or its themes as they leave the theatre. An eye-opening film, then and now.

EveryFilmIWatch is multi-channel film review project run by Sebastian Cox, ScriptUp co-founder. Further reviews can be found on Instagram.