BELLE DE JOUR (1967) C widescreen 100m dir: Luis Bunuel

w/Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Geneviève Page, Michel Piccoli, Pierre Clementi, Macha Méril, Francisco Rabal, Georges Marchal, Françoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Francis Blanche, Iska Khan

From the Turner Classic Movies website, www.tcm.com, this article about the film by Andrea Passafiume and Margarita Landazuri: "Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is the beautiful young wife of Pierre (Jean Sorel), a successful Parisian doctor. While she loves Pierre, even after a year of marriage, Séverine is still unable to be comfortable in a sexual relationship with him. Unbeknownst to her adoring, patient husband, beneath Séverine's reserved patrician beauty lies a vivid fantasy life involving violent masochistic scenarios of surrender in which she is dominated, punished and humiliated. To explore these fantasies, Séverine begins clandestinely working during the day as a prostitute in a high-end brothel while Pierre is at work. ...

"Belle de Jour is considered by many to be Bunuel's masterpiece, and it was his biggest and most enduring commercial success. Catherine Deneuve's performance as the title character is one of her finest contributions to her distinguished film career as one of France's most luminous stars. It is one of the roles most associated with her. Even with no explicit sex scenes and very little nudity, the film is widely considered to be one of the most erotic films in cinema history. Buuel's first color film, Belle de Jour is a sumptuous beautifully shot visual exercise that arouses the senses on every level, adding to the film's appeal. Belle de Jour has endured over the years as new generations continue to discover it and debate its ambiguous meaning.

"In 2006 famed Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira released his film Belle Toujours, an unofficial sequel to Belle de Jour. It imagines an encounter between Séverine (Bulle Ogier) and Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli, from Belle de Jour) many years later. The role of Séverine was offered to Catherine Deneuve, but she turned it down. 'I read the script because they wanted me to do it,' she said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian, 'but I didn't want to do it. I had the impression that it was only giving an explanation 30 years later for what I was, and what I had done.' She was leery of doing something 'that was only a proposition for Manoel de Oliveira, that had nothing to do with Bunuel. If it had been me,' she continued, 'I don't know, I think it would have been a little uh, "So what?" you know? I think it would have taken something off Belle de Jour.'

"In 2012 Vanity Fair named Belle de Jour one of the '25 Most Fashionable Films of All Time.' 'Long a point of reference for the fashionistas at the glossy magazines,' said Vanity Fair, "Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour offers up the blanc-de-Chine beauty of Catherine Deneuve, who plays the upper-class Séverine Serizy in one nifty little Yves Saint Laurent dress after another. These exquisitely simple shifts and double-breasted A-line coats, hemmed innocently to the knee, belie the baroque sexual fantasies of Deneuve's character--from whipped slave to bound Saint Sebastian to precocious schoolgirl. With her tumble of hair pulled back into tight buns and gleaming French rolls, she suggests an over-the-top Hitchcock blonde--the heroines of Vertigo [1958], The Birds [1963], and Marnie [1964] absorbed into one damaged, deceptive persona.

"Famed designer Yves Saint Laurent provided the beautiful stylish wardrobe for Catherine Deneuve in the film. In a 2005 interview she said, 'I think the clothes in Belle de Jour are very important to the style of the film because even today, when you look at it, it is still timeless.'

"In her private diaries that were published in 2005, Catherine Deneuve speaks of how Luis Bunuel wanted to use a crane shot in Belle de Jour but was unable to because no cranes were available in France at the time.

"Bunuel's collaborator on the Belle de Jour screenplay (as well as many others), Jean-Claude Carrière helped Bunuel write his fascinating autobiography My Last Sigh, which was published in 1983. On the book's dedication page Bunuel says: 'I'm not a writer, but my friend and colleague Jean-Claude Carrière is. An attentive listener and scrupulous recorder during our many long conversations, he helped me write this book.' ...

"Belle de Jour had its origins in the 1928 novel of the same name by French author Joseph Kessel. In 1966 the producing team of brothers Raymond and Robert Hakim approached Luis Bunuel about making a film adaptation of the book.

"Buuel at the time was in his mid-60s and in the midst of one of his most creative and productive phases as a director. The Spanish born Bunuel was a pioneering filmmaker, iconoclast, artist and provocateur. Having begun his career steeped in the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Bunuel became one of the most prominent international filmmakers working in France, Spain, the United States and Mexico. His films, which included Un Chien Andalou (1929), Viridiana (1961) and Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), were known for their vivid and often shocking imagery as well as being highly critical of bourgeois values and institutions.

"Bunuel demanded 'total freedom' from the Hakim brothers before agreeing to make Belle de Jour. 'I especially objected to a clause [in the contract],' recalled Bunuel, 'that gave the producers the right to intervene in the final cut to protect their investment.'

"Bunuel decided to team up with his friend and frequent writing collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière to adapt the novel into a screenplay. The pair had first worked together on Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and would ultimately make six films together.

"Bunuel knew that he wanted to put his own creative stamp on the novel's story when writing the screenplay, especially when it came to exploring Séverine's inner life. 'The novel is very melodramatic, but well-constructed,' he said in his 1983 autobiography My Last Sigh, 'and it offered me the chance to translate Séverine's fantasies into pictorial images as well as to draw a serious portrait of a young female bourgeois masochist. I was also able to indulge myself in the faithful description of some interesting sexual perversions.'

"The writing process and collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière went 'smoothly,' according to Bunuel. Carrière called the process of working with Buuel 'a fantastic adventure.'

"The producers had already hand-picked actress Catherine Deneuve to play the role of Séverine by the time Bunuel came on board. The stunningly beautiful Deneuve was already a film veteran in her early 20s, having been appearing in movies since the age of 13. However, she had only recently achieved international stardom through her breakout performances in Jacques Demy's heartbreaking musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Roman Polanski's thriller Repulsion (1965).

"Deneuve's substantial talent as an actress, along with her image as an icy enigmatic beauty, made her the ideal choice to play Séverine. However, even though the Hakim brothers had already made their preference clear, Bunuel still had veto power over her casting. 'If I don't have that freedom,' he said, 'I don't make a film.' After meeting with Deneuve, however, he easily agreed that she would be right for the part.

"After agreeing to use Deneuve, Bunuel hired Jean Sorel to play Séverine's oblivious husband Pierre. To round out the cast, Bunuel added a number of talented actors including Geneviève Page as Séverine's chic madame, Michel Piccoli as the predatory Henri and Pierre Clementi as Séverine's menacing client Marcel.

"Bunuel hired skilled cinematographer Sacha Vierny to shoot Belle de Jour, which would be his first color feature. Vierny had photographed a number of films for director Alain Resnais and would go on to another lengthy period of collaboration with director Peter Greenaway.

"For the striking opening sequence in which the audience first gets a glimpse into Séverine's masochistic fantasies, Bunuel originally wanted to use an entirely different location. '...my only regret about Belle de Jour was that the proprietor of the famous Train Bleu at the Gare de Lyon refused to allow me to shoot the opening scene on the premises,' Bunuel said in his 1983 autobiography. 'It's a spectacular restaurant on the second floor of the railroad station, designed around 1900 by a group of painters, sculptors, and decorators who created a kind of opera-house décor devoted to trains and the countries they can take us to.'

"Instead of filming at the Train Bleu, Bunuel ultimately shot the memorable opening sequence outdoors near a country estate. It was during the very first day of shooting this opening sequence that Bunuel heard about some complaints from his actors. 'An assistant came over to tell me the actors wanted to talk to me,' said Buuel. It concerned the syrupy dialogue between Jean Sorel's character Pierre and his bride Séverine before the violent sexual attack. 'Sorel had crossed out his lines and had written "his" dialogue over them,' Buuel continued. "'What have you done?" I asked him. Very politely, he said, "Excuse me, sir, doesn't this seem ridiculous to you?" "Yes,' I told him, "but don't you know what happens afterwards? After this banal dialogue, you begin to beat her with a whip, to drag her through the mud. Just deliver it as it is written." And that's how he said it.'

"Bunuel's directing style, as always, was loose and instinctive. 'I don't use any particular technique when I work,' he said in his autobiography. 'My direction depends entirely on how good the actors are, on what they suggest, or the kind of effort I have to make if they're not suited to their roles...all direction depends on your personal vision, a certain something you feel strongly but can't always explain.'

"While the film was shooting, actress Catherine Deneuve said publicly that she was enjoying making Belle de Jour. Other than remarking that shooting some of the brothel scenes could be 'difficult,' she said at the time that she was 'in awe' of Bunuel and called him 'wonderful to work with; kind, understanding, very sweet, very human.'

"However, Deneuve was much more unhappy while making the film than she originally let on. In a 2004 interview she revealed that making the film 'wasn't a terribly positive experience' for her. She felt that Bunuel had been isolated from the actors by the producers, and there had been a breakdown in communication as a result. She felt 'very exposed in every sense of the word,' she said, 'but very exposed physically, which caused me distress; I felt they showed more of me than they'd said they were going to...There were moments when I felt totally used. I was very unhappy.'

"Bunuel knew that she was unhappy, but he felt that it was mostly because she didn't understand his working style and the reasons behind his choices. 'She didn't want her breasts to be seen,' he recalled, 'and the hairdresser put a strip of fabric around her. She had to appear nude for a moment, putting on a stocking to keep her breasts from being seen during that movement, she bound them up in a taffeta band.'

"Before the film was released, Bunuel was pressured to make some cuts for the censors, which he later came to regret. 'The Hakims told me, "By letting the censors cut one thing, you keep them from cutting even more,"' said Bunuel. He was especially bothered to have to cut the scene between Séverine and the Duke (Georges Marchal). Originally, the scene had Sverine lying in a coffin in a private chapel after a Mass with a 'splendid' copy of one of Grnewald's Christ paintings clearly visible on the wall. 'The suppression of the Mass,' he said, 'completely changes the character of this scene.' The scene, he said, 'had more value with the painting of the Grnewald Christ, which is the most terrible image of Christ...It was painted in a ferociously realistic style. This image was important because it prepared the audience for the next scene.' An edited version of the scene stayed in the film, but to Bunuel, it lacked the same impact without the original imagery.

"Belle de Jour went on to win the Golden Lion - the grand prize - at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. Pushing the usual buttons of shock and confusion that Bunuel's work often did, the film garnered considerable praise and attention upon its release. 'It was my biggest commercial success,' he said, 'which I attribute more to the marvelous whores [in the film] than to my direction.'

"The film also generated a great deal of discussion and debate among audiences about its meaning and what scenes were real versus being part of Séverine's fantasies. Bunuel, as usual, didn't feel the need to explain his work, which only added to the film's mystique. This blurring of reality and fantasy, he said, was 'what stimulated me to film the story. By the end, the real and the imaginary fuse. I myself cannot tell you what is real and what's imaginary in the film. For me they form the same thing.'

"One scene in the film that audiences obsessed over was the one in which an Asian client entered the brothel with a mysterious box containing an unknown object that is never revealed. When he opens the box to show the prostitutes what is inside, Séverine is the only one who agrees to an encounter while the others turn away in horror. Bunuel found that the most common question people asked him about the film later concerned the contents of the box. It was a question he found 'senseless...I can't count the number of times people (particularly women) have asked me what was in the box, but since I myself have no idea, I usually reply, "Whatever you want there to be."'

"As for the famously ambiguous ending that audiences debated endlessly, Bunuel said, 'I don't understand it. This is my lack of certitude. It's the moment when I don't know what to do, I have various solutions and I can't decide on any one of them. Finally, I end up putting in my own uncertainty...I can only say that in life there are situations that don't end, that have no solution.'

"As he often did when he completed a film, Bunuel claimed after 40+ years of filmmaking that his latest work would be his last. 'No more cinema for me--not in Spain, not in France, nowhere,' he said at the time. "Belle de Jour is my last film.' As was also his habit as a driven and inspired artist, his words went out the window as he was back at work in no time on his next film, The Milky Way (1969).

"Catherine Deneuve decided that because of her negative experience on Belle de Jour, it was important to her to work with Bunuel one more time as a way to challenge herself and clear the air. Just a few years later she and Bunuel collaborated once again on the well-received Tristana (1970), which turned out to be a much happier experience for Deneuve.

"Working on a second film with Bunuel, along with the passage of time, helped Deneuve make her peace with Belle de Jour. In a 2009 interview she said, 'I prefer to be associated with Belle de Jour than a lot of other things, frankly. I think it's a great film.'

"Following its initial release in 1967, Belle de Jour wasn't seen again for many years due to some rights issues with the Hakim brothers' estate. The absence of the film from circulation--including home video--for so long only helped build up its mystique for a new generation who had not yet seen it.

"It was Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese, a longtime fan of the film, who helped spearhead the effort to get Belle de Jour a limited high profile release in 1995 through Miramax Zo, a subsidiary company created by Miramax to acquire and distribute French films in the U.S. As a result, the film found itself in the spotlight once again and soon became easily available to be discovered and appreciated by new generations.

"Blonde and beautiful Catherine Deneuve became a star in France in Jacques Demy's 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and earned rave reviews with her riveting portrait of madness in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965). But it was Luis Bunuel's controversial erotic masterpiece Belle de jour (1967) that made her an international star and became a worldwide box office blockbuster.

"Deneuve plays Séverine, an elegant, aloof young housewife who loves her husband but is unable to respond sexually to him. She is plagued by fantasies in which she is sexually debased and abused by her husband and other men-and enjoys it. When Séverine learns that an acquaintance has been working in a brothel, she is disturbingly attracted to the idea, and visits the establishment. Soon she is working there every afternoon, under the name "Belle de jour" (Daytime Beauty), and not only juggling her two lives, but making her dangerous fantasies come true.

"Spanish-born director Luis Bunuel was in his late sixties and in the remarkable final act of a prolific career that had seen him go from founding surrealist, to political documentarian, to exile in Mexico, to renowned international filmmaker. In 1966 Buuel was recruited by producers Robert and Raymond Hakim to make a film version of Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel Belle de jour. According to critic Michael Wilmington, 'Though Belle de jour wasn't a project Buuel initiated or even a novel he much liked, he found in it the classic "Bunuelian" elements: dark comedy, l'amour fou, unsparing social criticism, and intoxicating, terrifying dreams.'

"In his autobiography, Bunuel wrote, 'The novel is very melodramatic, but well-constructed, and it offered me the chance to translate Séverine's fantasies into pictorial images as well as to draw a serious portrait of a young female bourgeois masochist.' But he also notes slyly that he relished the task: 'I was also able to indulge myself in the faithful description of some interesting sexual perversions. (My fascination with fetishism was already evident in the faithful descriptions of El (1953) and the boot scene in Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964.)" Along with his co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (who co-wrote most of Bunuel's later films), Bunuel reportedly visited brothels in Madrid to soak up the atmosphere, and talked to many women about their sexual fantasies.

"Deneuve was already attached to the project, and Bunuel had no say about her casting. She found him remote. 'It wasn't a terribly positive experience. Bunuel had been surrounded by protective producers, and we didn't talk much,' she recalled in a 2004 interview. The nudity was also a problem for her. She felt 'very exposed in every sense of the word, and very exposed physically, which caused me distress; I felt they showed more of me than they'd said they were going to...I think it's a wonderful film, but...the producers isolated Bunuel, I couldn't really talk to him, or see the rushes. There were moments when I felt terribly used. I was very unhappy.' For his part, Bunuel said Deneuve was so shy that the hairdresser had to bind her breasts so they would not show. But he did admit that she was a very good actress, and when investors insisted that he cast her in the title role in Tristana (1970), he agreed. Deneuve says the latter is a favorite among her films-even though making it was also difficult.

"Looking back on working with Bunuel, Deneuve mused, 'French is not his language, so on Belle de jour, I'm sure that it was much more of an effort for him to have to explain. I've always thought that he likes actors, up to a point. I think he likes very much the idea of the film, and to write it. But I had the impression that the film-making was not what he preferred to do. He had to go through actors, and he liked them if they were easy, simple, not too much fuss.' Bunuel has a cameo appearance in Belle de jour, sitting at a table with one of the Hakim brothers, in the Bois de Boulogne fantasy sequence where Séverine is picked up by the Duke.

"Belle de jour won the Golden Lion Award at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, and opened worldwide in the spring of 1968 to ecstatic reviews and great box office. Arthur Knight wrote in the Saturday Review, 'It would be difficult to imagine any actress more entrancingly right in this pivotal role than Catherine Deneuve. With her blond, wide-eyed beauty and patrician elegance, she seems wholly credible, immune to the sordid life into which she plunges herself.' New York Times critic Renata Adler called it 'a really beautiful movie, and somehow, letting the color in --- this is Bunuel's first color film --- has changed the emotional quality of his obsessions in a completely unpredictable way.' Audiences and critics speculated endlessly on the meaning of the fantasies, and of the film's ending. Belle de jour became Bunuel's (and Deneuve's) biggest commercial success, which the director attributed in his autobiography 'more to the marvelous whores than to my direction.' He also had one complaint: 'Of all the senseless questions asked about the movie, one of the most frequent concerns the little box that an Oriental client brings to the brothel....I can't count the number of times that people (particularly women) asked me what was in the box, but since I myself have no idea, I usually reply, "Whatever you want it to be."'

"'Luis Bunuel's particular combination of religion, decay, and morbid eroticism has never been my absolutely favorite kind of cinema...But Belle de Jour...is a really beautiful movie, and somehow, letting the color in --- this is Bunuel's first color film --- has changed the emotional quality of his obsessions in a completely unpredictable way.' -- The New York Times

"'...Belle de Jour is a fitting capstone to the curious career of an unpopular but near-legendary film maker whose favorite themes have been anticlericalism, madness, festishist fantasies and the wilder frontiers of sex...Since other directors have long since surpassed Bunuel when it comes to on-screen presentation of sex, most audiences will not find anything visually shocking about Belle de Jour. They will find instead a cumulative mystery: What is really happening and what is not?...Fantasy, he seems to be saying, is nothing but the human dimension of reality that makes life tolerable, and sometimes even fun. If this is his message, Bunuel dresses it up in Belle de Jour with unaccustomed cinematic smoothness. Instead of the brutal bludgeoning in black-and-white that audiences have come to expect from such Bunuel classics as Viridiana (1961) or Los Olvidados (1950), Belle de Jour is composed in color with an eye to elegance that is well suited to the cool beauty of Deneuve...Deneuve is well on her way to becoming a serious star.' -- Time magazine

"'It is possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best. That's because it understands eroticism from the inside-out --- understands how it exists not in sweat and skin, but in the imagination.' - Roger Ebert

"'...wry and disturbing tale of a virginal newlywed who works the day shift in a high-class Parisian brothel, unbeknownst to her patient husband. Bunuel's straight-faced treatment of shocking subject matter belies the sharp wit of his script...Deneuve's finest, most enigmatic performance.' -- Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide

"'Catherine Deneuve is at her iciest as the perverse Séverine, a Parisian housewife whose double life as a prostitute allows her to explore the masochistic fantasies that fill her dreams. Bunuel...easily travels between Séverine's real and fantasy worlds, presenting both with equal clarity...The director may have been ahead of his time, but he displays no more compassion for his characters than a psycho killer shows for his victims. Bunuel, who adapted the screenplay from Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, does give the audience a choice of endings. The happy one is obviously another of Séverine's fantasies. Belle seems the work of a beast." - The Washington Post

"AWARDS AND HONORS

"Belle de Jour won the Golden Lion - the grand prize - at the 1967 Venice Film Festival.

"Catherine Deneuve received a BAFTA Film Award nomination for Best Actress.

"Belle de Jour won the Best Film of 1967 honors from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics."