Belle de Jour: Buñuel's Elegant Study of Fantasy

Luis Buñuel was sixty-seven when he made Belle de Jour, an age at which most directors are either repeating themselves or retired. He had spent four decades scandalising the pious, going back to the sliced eyeball of Un Chien Andalou in 1929, and he approached this material — a bourgeois wife who spends her afternoons working in a discreet Paris brothel — with the amused patience of a man who has nothing left to prove. The result took the Golden Lion at Venice in 1967 and became, improbably, one of the most elegant films ever assembled around the subject of erotic fantasy. It is also one of the least explicit. That combination is the whole trick.

The film adapts a 1928 novel by Joseph Kessel, a writer Buñuel openly disdained, which freed him to keep the premise and throw away the moralising. Working with his great collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, he turned a lurid confession into a cool, precise study of a woman’s interior life, filmed in the deadpan register he had perfected. Nothing is underlined. The camera regards Séverine’s daydreams and her waking hours with exactly the same unhurried composure, and it declines, at every turn, to tell you which is which.

The premise, kept above the line

Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, married to Pierre (Jean Sorel), a young surgeon who is kind, handsome and sexually patient to the point of paralysis. She loves him and cannot bear him to touch her. Through an acquaintance she hears of a house run by Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) and, drawn by something she does not understand, presents herself there. Because she can only come in the afternoons, between two and five, Anaïs christens her Belle de Jour — beauty of the day, a pun on the belle de nuit, the night-blooming flower and the older French euphemism for a working woman.

Around this arrangement Buñuel arranges a small gallery of clients and one dangerous complication: Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), a young gangster with steel-capped teeth and a jealous streak, who becomes fixated on her. Meanwhile Husson (Michel Piccoli), a leering friend of the family who first mentioned the house to her, circles the secret like a man deciding when to use it. All of this is safe to describe, because the plot is the least interesting thing about Belle de Jour. The film’s real business is the traffic between what Séverine does and what she imagines, and Buñuel stages that traffic so seamlessly that you are never given solid ground to stand on.

Why it works: the refusal to explain

The formal masterstroke is the absence of a signal. A conventional film cues its fantasies — a harp glissando, a dissolve, a soft-focus lens — so the audience knows it has left the real world. Buñuel strips all of that out. The opening sequence, in which Séverine is dragged from a carriage and mistreated on Pierre’s orders, is shot with the same flat clarity as her breakfast table, and only when Pierre speaks to her tenderly a moment later do you realise you have been inside her head. From there the ground never firms up. A daydream can begin mid-scene and end without a seam. By the final reel you have stopped trying to sort the columns and simply accepted that, for this woman, they are the same country.

Sacha Vierny’s cinematography is the quiet hero here. Vierny had shot Last Year at Marienbad for Alain Resnais, and he brings the same glacial control — clean interiors, unshowy compositions, a palette of greys and creams and the odd shock of red. The film looks like a fashion plate because, in part, it is one: Deneuve’s wardrobe was designed by Yves Saint Laurent, and the vinyl trench coat, the Roger Vivier buckled shoes and the double-breasted dresses turned Séverine into an icon of 1960s style before the film had even finished its first run. Buñuel understood that the surface polish was the joke. The more impeccable the bourgeois exterior, the more the fantasies underneath curdle and gleam.

Deneuve is essential to all of this, and the story of the production is that she and Buñuel barely got on. She found him remote; he found her a perfect instrument precisely because she gave him so little. Her Séverine is a closed room. The face registers almost nothing, which forces the viewer to project, to guess, to fill the vacuum with speculation — and that act of projection is exactly the film’s subject. You end up doing to Séverine what her clients and her daydreams do: reading desire into a blank and elegant surface.

The famous withheld box

No account of Belle de Jour can skip the box. A Japanese client arrives at the house, produces a small lacquered box, opens it and shows the contents to the assembled women. We hear a faint buzzing. Two of the workers recoil; Séverine is intrigued and goes upstairs with him. We never see inside the box. Buñuel was asked about it for the rest of his life and cheerfully refused to answer, sometimes claiming he did not know himself. It has become one of cinema’s great deliberate blanks, a Rorschach test that the director built into the film on purpose.

This is the collector’s key to the whole picture. The box is Belle de Jour in miniature — an object of desire whose power depends entirely on being withheld, on the viewer’s imagination doing the work no image could. It is also why the film reads as tasteful while circling the most delicate material. Buñuel shows you almost nothing. The eroticism lives in ellipsis, in cutaways, in the surrealist’s trust that the mind supplies a stronger picture than the lens ever could. A lesser director would have opened the box. Buñuel knew that the closed lid was the art.

The collector’s note

The obvious ancestor is Buñuel himself, and the film sits inside a run of late masterpieces — The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty — in which he skewers the manners of the propertied class with a straight face. But the more useful cross-reference for anyone chasing this thread is the wider strand of art cinema that treated erotic fantasy as a serious formal problem rather than an exploitation hook. Nagisa Ōshima pushed the same material to its most extreme and unflinching in In the Realm of the Senses, where obsession is filmed with a candour Buñuel would never have wanted; the two films make a fascinating pair precisely because one withholds everything and the other withholds nothing.

For the more playful, worldly end of the same territory, Radley Metzger was doing something adjacent in America and Europe at almost the same moment, dressing frank adult subject matter in impeccable production design and dry wit — start with Score and you will hear the same conviction that sophistication and eros belong in the same frame. Buñuel is cooler and stranger than any of them, but he opened a door these filmmakers walked through, and Belle de Jour remains the most respectable film ever made about a daydream nobody dares admit to.

The verdict, above the line

Belle de Jour is a masterpiece of tact, which is a strange thing to say about a film with this synopsis. It hands you a scenario that a hundred cheaper pictures would have wallowed in, and then declines to wallow, declines to explain, declines even to tell you whether most of what you are watching is happening at all. Everything above this line is safe to read before you watch. To argue about the ending — the most debated final scene in Buñuel’s work — I have to describe it, so the rest goes below the line.

Spoilers below

The last act tightens into something that looks, briefly, like consequence. Marcel, unable to bear that Séverine will not leave Pierre, comes to the apartment and shoots Pierre before being gunned down himself in the street. Pierre survives but is left paralysed and mute, confined to a wheelchair, blind or near-blind depending on how you read the staging. Husson, the family friend who has always known Séverine’s secret, visits and — out of what he frames as kindness — tells Pierre everything about Belle de Jour. Séverine, watching her husband’s ruined face take in the truth, seems finally exposed and punished, the bourgeois order reasserting itself over the woman who transgressed it.

Then Buñuel pulls the rug. In the closing moments the bells of the fantasy carriage from the opening are heard again; Séverine looks up, Pierre rises from his wheelchair, whole and smiling, and the two of them speak of a holiday as though nothing has happened. The camera drifts to the window and the empty carriage passes below, its harness bells ringing. The film ends on an image that dissolves every certainty it appeared to have established.

The question the ending forces is unanswerable by design, and that is the point. Perhaps the shooting and the paralysis were themselves a daydream, and Séverine’s secret was never discovered. Perhaps the recovery is the fantasy and Pierre remains destroyed. Perhaps — the most vertiginous reading — the entire film has been a construction of Séverine’s inner life, with no stable reality anywhere in it. Buñuel provides no key. He has spent ninety minutes teaching you that this woman’s fantasies and her reality occupy the same visual plane, and the finale simply refuses to separate them one last time, harder than before.

This is why Belle de Jour has outlasted every prurient film it was once shelved beside. Its subject is not sex; its subject is the impossibility of drawing a clean border around desire, guilt and imagination, and Buñuel dramatises that impossibility through pure form — through editing, framing and a sound cue of distant bells. My verdict: it is the surrealist’s most seductive film and his most controlled, a work that treats the erotic imagination with more respect than any explicit picture ever managed, precisely because it trusts you to fill the box yourself. Watch it, then set it against In the Realm of the Senses to see the same subject taken to the opposite extreme. The carriage bells are still ringing, and Buñuel is still declining to tell you what they mean.