A delightful puzzle, and Deneuve's finest hour-and-a-half. She plays a happily married middle-class woman who genuinely loves, but is unable to feel passionate toward, her husband, a successful surgeon. She eventually finds fulfilment of a kind by pursing a career as a high-class,
afternoons-only (hence "Belle de Jour") prostitute.
As the film opens, a handsome young 19th-century couple (Jean Sorel, Catherine Deneuve) whisper sweet nothings to each other during a carriage ride through a beautiful country estate. Suddenly and inexplicably angered, the man orders his partner out of the carriage, and has the two drivers drag
her to a nearby tree, to which she is tied and subjected to a brutal whipping. The man then casually tells the drivers to rape her. Cut to the young woman lounging in bed in a modern-day Paris bedroom, where she has fantasized the entire sequence. Or has she?
Nothing else in BELLE DE JOUR quite lives up to the exquisite jolt of that first shift from fantasy to reality, or vice versa. Throughout, Bunuel juggles scenes that may be "real" with others that seem like dreams or wish-fulfilments. But, by the end, the technique seems more like a means of
toying with the audience than a genuine correlative for the protagonist's conflicted state of mind. The result is almost, but not quite, a great movie--as opaque as its central character, it teases and intrigues, but falls short of delivering emotional satisfaction. Essential viewing, though, if
only for Deneuve's signature performance; Pierre Clementi also shines in the role of a brutal young hood who develops an obsession with "Belle." Having been withdrawn from circulation by its producers at the end of the 1970s, BELLE DE JOUR was re-released theatrically (and billed as "presented by
Martin Scorsese") in 1995 by Miramax Zoe, a new division of the independent juggernaut devoted to "rescuing" lost French classics. leave a comment --Michael Scheinfeld
