Revisiting Luis Bunuel's Belle de jour yesterday brought three particular films of 1967 to mind, all of which I've seen and reviewed here recently, each one revealing itself to be an unconscious tributary of sorts to a movie that launched Bunuel to even greater heights of achievement than he had already attained in a spectacular cinematic career. The first is The Young Girls of Rochefort, a lavish French musical starring Catherine Deneuve, who also plays the lead character here, a woman named Severine but who adopts the alias which gives Bunuel's film its title. In Jacques Demy's film, Deneuve is every bit as beautiful and alluring there as she is here (as evidenced by the poster just to the left of these words) but the two roles require her to project subtly varied aspects of her sexuality and personality. Given that the two films were shot in such close proximity, I'm quite impressed by her ability to switch emotional gears as an actor, not to mention the fortuitous achievement of finding her way into two marvelous classic films of such different genres.
In Young Girls, she remains steadfastly chaste and demure even as she is pursued and propositioned by handsome young men, a diffidence perhaps necessitated by the fact that her character has an equally attractive sister (played by real-life sibling Francoise Dorleac) with whom she's made a promise not to give themselves over to sensuality and the propositions of eager gentlemen before all their criteria have been met. In Belle de jour, Deneuve's impeccable approximation of a certain ideal of feminine beauty is amplified even further, perfectly poised with the latest in haute couture fashions delivered directly from the studio of Yves Saint Laurent, accompanied by flawless make-up and hair styling, personal servants and all the other obligatory comforts as befits the upper class bourgeois lifestyle appropriate for a woman married to a handsome and prosperous surgeon in Paris. But all that glamour and rarefied good taste turns out to be a cover-up, or perhaps more accurately a source of maddening confinement, for the sexually tormented interior life that Severine has struggled to manage, up until the point that viewers enter into her journey as we experience this film.
Her outlet, as we soon discover, is to work short "day shifts" at a local brothel, of the discreet, high class sort, after her mind is informed and her imagination is piqued due to a bit of juicy gossip from a friend and confirmation by a wise old cabbie that such houses still exist, despite all the technological conveniences of modern, postwar French society. Here is the place where, in a strange and perverse way, she has the means to work through the convoluted mixture of guilt, repression, shame, confusion and inhibition that has been building since a traumatic childhood experience of molestation first erected an insurmountable barrier between her psyche and her body. Prior to her enlistment in the ranks of upscale Parisian whores, Severine's preferred method has been to escape into lurid fantasies that involve her being mastered by brash, lusty, rapacious men - alternate versions of her husband and other imaginary lovers- scenarios that provide Bunuel with abundant visual possibilities that in turn, fire up the imaginations of his paying theatrical customers. This escapist obstruction, and her deeply ingrained fear of acting on these forbidden impulses, has made it impossible for her to find intimacy with her husband, a kindly indulgent but frustrated man who has so many good things going for him - his looks, his occupation, his affluence - but is denied the deeper joy and satisfaction that he thought would accompany his marriage to such a beautiful, desirable wife.
At this point, my attention turns to Jean-Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, an even more contemporaneous film that also focused on the currently observed trend among suburban French married women to engage in prostitution as a means of supplementing their family income. As might be expected, Godard's focus was much more on the materialism and facile conformity to socio-economic pressures of these women, who sought to balance their need to uphold conventional bourgeois morality (by retaining the illusion that it was their husbands who served as heads of the household by keeping their illicit activities secret, or at least, not subject to casual discussion). The political critique, along with Godard's inherent sympathy toward the women themselves (he seems much more comfortable blaming "the system" or even more specifically, the policies of the French president at the time Charles de Gaulle, for any corruption implied by his pseudo-documentary coverage) takes center stage in that film. With Bunuel, he is compelled in this story, adapted from a popular novel of the time, by his life long interest in depicting (as opposed to "explaining") the darker and more scandalous manifestations of erotic consciousness. That theme is readily apparent in practically all of his films going back to the celebrated beginning of his career, a collaborative effort with painter Salvador Dali titled Un chien Andalou. But in Belle de jour, Bunuel brings the hints of sexual deviancy and obsession out of the subtext and sidelines right into the center of the action. It's almost a reversal of the priorities he pursued in a film like Viridiana, though a more disciplined study than I'm willing to make at the moment of his filmography between that title and this one might posit a gradually shifting recalibration in his emphasis on the cognitive dissonances respectively imposed by religion and sexuality (and how those two primal forces interplay with each other in our social roles and our subjective interpretations of life.)
The third film that Belle de jour got me thinking about was Robert Bresson's Mouchette, released just two months earlier in the spring of 1967. As closely connected as Young Girls... and 2 or 3 Things... may be, the parallels between Belle... and Mouchette are, to my mind, even more striking, and in a way, unsettling in regard to the apparent exploitation involved. I already wrote at some length in my review of that film about my discomfort with Bresson's approach in recounting the story of a young girl's sexual coming of age. Much of that was based on his apparent fixation with teenagers (including a similar treatment of the topic in his previous film Au hasard Balthazar, and the later-in-life disclosure by Anne Wiazemski, that film's female lead, of Bresson's unbecoming romantic advances toward her during production.) Here, it's hard for me to totally dismiss the sense that Bunuel was in his own way processing some of his own warped peccadilloes in the process of making this movies, and any admirer who observes his work will certainly understand that his approach to cinema was indeed very personal on that level. To his credit, at least Bunuel is casting mature adult women instead of vulnerable girls with no professional experience to fall back on. And even though Deneuve complained at the time at some of the harsh treatment she had to endure for the sake of making this film, Bunuel did give her the artistic respect and freedom to personally shape and inhabit the role, to make it her own and in a genuine way outshine the director himself in her performance (as much as both Bunuel and Bresson eschewed that particular aspect of the actor's craft.) That autonomy to approach the project with her own creative and expressive talent, fully respecting her personal intelligence and dignity, is something that Bresson wasn't willing to allow his "models" to bring with them into the filmmaking process, and while that prohibition does give his films a very distinctive auteurist touch that in many ways makes them unique and irreplaceable, to me it seems like it forced his actors to pay too high a price for the privilege of involvement with his artistry.
Bunuel on the other hand does seem willing to pursue his own peculiar vision while also allowing others to lend their own voices and perspectives to the final product. His screenwriting collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere plays a crucial role, as was the case especially in all of Bunuel's late career films that took place in France, as he provided essential linkage between that particular culture and Bunuel's more cosmopolitan outlook on the kinds of things that us humans tend to fetishize. That reality-based grounding is necessary to create the sense of uncanny juxtaposition that makes surrealism "work" - just plausible enough to draw us in, before jolting us out of complacency with a phenomenological left hook that leaves mentally destabilized, and from time to time flattened out on the canvas if we were too zeroed in on the plot to the point that we didn't see the punch coming.
There is so much going on in this film. In my former method of taking a week or more between blog posts, I probably could have spent ten or more days just reading up, gathering data, revisiting the film and composing an essay more carefully planned out and comprehensive than this one. But nowadays I'm committed to delivering more quick takes and moving on to the next one. Intimations of mortality, and a sure knowledge of how many films still await my scrutiny, propels me. Still, just one indicator of how packed with significance Belle de jour truly is can be found in the number of "labels" I originally wanted to assign to it. The labels can be found at the bottom of my posts. They're a tool that blogger.com gives us to link our posts together by common themes or key words, but we're limited to 20 selections. Here are the labels I had to delete: Alcohol, Aristocracy, Cats, Censorship, Christianity, Cold, Dream Sequence, Explicit, Exploitation, Fashion, Feminism, Hypocrisy, Medical, Psychology, Religion, Repression, Revenge, Sea, Strange, Violence, Wealth. Each of these words link to discussion-worthy aspect of this film, and there are more I could have come up with and coined specifically for this review. I often have to make some kind of decisions when I reach my limit of 20, but this entry had many more difficult dilemmas for me to sort out than usual, in what should be a relatively simple task. Just something I thought I'd mention. I have much more I could say, and I'd be delighted to record a podcast about it sometime!
Of the three trailers for the film included in Criterion's nicely appointed Blu-ray release from 2012, I prefer by far the original European version, posted above. It captures many key moments of the film while preserving its most essential mysteries for proper discovery in the context of the entire film. The other two, both American in origin and amusingly tawdry in their approach, serve more as comic relief in showing how the studios sought to entice viewers in the late 1960s and the late 1990s (the latter version utilizes the prestige of Martin Scorcese's imprimatur and a horribly awkward attempt at seductive voice over.) I can't find that one online, but here's the 1968 promo. Probably best viewed in a raincoat, delivered in a plain brown wrapper.
Next: Samurai Rebellion