Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 surrealist masterpiece, fuses an in-depth psychological portrayal of a sexually disturbed bourgeois housewife with a critique of the hypocrisies of Parisian society. Severine (portrayed by the beautifully pale Catherine Deneuve) is married to Pierre, a young and successful doctor. While she loves him she is incapable of bringing herself to be physically intimate with him. Instead, her childhood experiences of molestation and her feelings of housewife ennui lead her to seek out a different form of sexual pleasure, provided by the brothel where she finds employment.
There she is given the name “Belle de Jour” (beauty of the day), which captures the fleetingness and fragility of her allure. While she becomes one of the most sought after prostitutes of the brothel, she keeps her outside life a mystery, and ponders leaving the brothel when she feels that she can finally achieve intimacy with her husband. However, her desire for domination and her frustration with the banality of her married life lead her to once again seek out the masochistic pleasure that she is only able to attain within the brothel’s walls.
Severine’s life is further complicated when she experiences love for the first time. Marcel, a young rough-and-tumble gangster, is brought into the brothel by his partner. He chooses Severine and becomes infatuated with her, and she with him, allowing him to sleep with her for free, and violating the normal, professonal relationship she keeps with her clients. However, Severine’s slow but eventual social awareness, leads her to want to sever ties with both the brothel and Marcel. She attempts to do this, but Marcel is reluctant to let go of his object of love and infatuation.
His pursuit of Severine leads to a dramatic conclusion that seems to leave Severine’s once full and complete bourgeois life nearly permanently shattered. Still, Buñuel’s artistry and use of a variety of cinematic conventions and techniques leads viewers to continuously question the tenuous reality created by the images playing out before them on the screen.
Buñuel puts surrealism’s psychoanalytic basis fully on display in the film, as characters seem representative of his three-part conception of the individual mind. Pierre, as the successful Parisian bourgeois doctor is an easy stand-in for the superego, representing a social desire to impose order on ego and id. Severine, as a self-conscious character, represents the ego, torn between social imposition and the libidinal desires of the id. Finally, Marcel as sex-and-love crazed thug represents the id, in all its unbridled passion that only longs for satiation. The film is enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, whether it is taken as psychoanalytic allegory or a bizarre portrayal of love, desire and perversion.
West Lecture Hall. Sunday, April 6 at 8 p.m. and 10p.m. $1.