Book O'Dead
4th June 2011, 17:19
I just finished watching a DVD edition of Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de jour”, a movie that’s influenced other renowned erotic melodramas and comedies of the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s. I had not seen it before.
This film centers on Severine, a wealthy bourgeois housewife (played by Catherine Denueve) whose sado-masochistic fantasies--and the inopportune comment of a family friend (Michel Piccoli)--lead her into a second, secret life of a high-priced hooker in an upper-class Paris bordello.
Like a character out of a Marquis de Sade comedy, Severine undergoes many trials, encountering a number of wealthy clients with sexual aberrations involving mutual domination and humiliation. At first she is outraged and ashamed but soon learns to enjoy and even revel in her newfound role as a salaried whore.
Meanwhile, at home with hubby (played by Jean Sorel), our anti-heroine is sexually unresponsive, timid, and guilt-ridden, as briefly illustrated in a first communion sequence which Buñuel masterfully shows us. Her handsome surgeon husband is completely in the dark about her secret life; he believes that her apparent scruples about sex are motivated by a strict Catholic upbringing and a virtuous disposition [thus the above mentioned scene of a young girl kneeling before a priest and recoiling in horror as he offers the Eucharist].
By the time her remorse begins to wear off, Severine’s secret double life is unexpectedly discovered. Before then, her adventure has already become somewhat complicated and threatens to destroy her comfortable but superficial bourgeois existence.
Buñuel skillfully manages to blend the film’s reality with dream sequences so that at moments we are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy. As the commentary on the DVD prematurely points out, the movie begins and ends with the dream motif the director has created to convey Severine’s divided state of mind. For those seeing it for the first time I recommend watching it without the commentary to allow for the surprise and tension experienced as this erotic romance unfolds.
Many film buffs will agree that Luis Buñuel was one of cinema’s greatest subversives.
His radical feminism and anti-bourgeois sentiments were unabashedly expressed throughout his directing career as far back as “Un chien andalou”, which he co-directed with Surrealist painter Salvador Dali. In his films Buñuel never fully abandoned his Surrealist origins; he let loose in films like That Obscure Object of Desire and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where the line between film reality and fantasy were totally blurred from beginning to end. Buñuel used what today is considered standard soap-opera forms to convey his radical views about “middle class sexual mores, seducing his audience into absorbing subversive themes with seemingly banal story telling.
My first experience with a Buñuel movie came as a child with “Los Olvidados” (The Forsaken), made during his exile in Mexico from Spain’s Fascist regime and marking one of the highest points of the Golden Era of Mexican cinema. Done in neo-Realist style, Los Olvidados is a faux Dickensian morality tale about a homeless orphan doomed to destruction. Los Olvidados is Oliver Twist turned upside down and inside out.
His eventual and unexpected return to his native country during Franco’s dictatorship was famous (infamous to some) because there he made “Viridiana” a melodramatic comedy about a nun who is seduced and raped by her wealthy uncle played by Fernando Rey. By the time the Spanish censors realized the underlying radical theme smuggled into the film, it was too late to do anything but ban the movie from showing in Spain. It was not publicly seen there until well after Franco’s death. In order to make his film in Spain Buñuel made a deal with the Devil, as it were, and soundly beat him to the delight of many.
It’s not hard to see where contemporary European directors like Pedro Almodovar and Peter Greenaway draw their ideological inspiration. Such films as Dark Habits (Almodovar) and The Draughtsman’s Contract (Greeanaway), just to name two, surely owe to Buñuel’s pioneering film explorations.
Moreover, and more immediately, Buñuel’s movies offer a sound antidote to the maternalism and machismo so prevalent in post-20th Century cinema.
Belle de jour is a film every Marxist interested in cinema should watch, especially in these times, when so many leftists have succumbed to the toxic notion that prostitution is a social phenomenon capable of transcending class-ruled society.
This film centers on Severine, a wealthy bourgeois housewife (played by Catherine Denueve) whose sado-masochistic fantasies--and the inopportune comment of a family friend (Michel Piccoli)--lead her into a second, secret life of a high-priced hooker in an upper-class Paris bordello.
Like a character out of a Marquis de Sade comedy, Severine undergoes many trials, encountering a number of wealthy clients with sexual aberrations involving mutual domination and humiliation. At first she is outraged and ashamed but soon learns to enjoy and even revel in her newfound role as a salaried whore.
Meanwhile, at home with hubby (played by Jean Sorel), our anti-heroine is sexually unresponsive, timid, and guilt-ridden, as briefly illustrated in a first communion sequence which Buñuel masterfully shows us. Her handsome surgeon husband is completely in the dark about her secret life; he believes that her apparent scruples about sex are motivated by a strict Catholic upbringing and a virtuous disposition [thus the above mentioned scene of a young girl kneeling before a priest and recoiling in horror as he offers the Eucharist].
By the time her remorse begins to wear off, Severine’s secret double life is unexpectedly discovered. Before then, her adventure has already become somewhat complicated and threatens to destroy her comfortable but superficial bourgeois existence.
Buñuel skillfully manages to blend the film’s reality with dream sequences so that at moments we are unable to distinguish fact from fantasy. As the commentary on the DVD prematurely points out, the movie begins and ends with the dream motif the director has created to convey Severine’s divided state of mind. For those seeing it for the first time I recommend watching it without the commentary to allow for the surprise and tension experienced as this erotic romance unfolds.
Many film buffs will agree that Luis Buñuel was one of cinema’s greatest subversives.
His radical feminism and anti-bourgeois sentiments were unabashedly expressed throughout his directing career as far back as “Un chien andalou”, which he co-directed with Surrealist painter Salvador Dali. In his films Buñuel never fully abandoned his Surrealist origins; he let loose in films like That Obscure Object of Desire and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where the line between film reality and fantasy were totally blurred from beginning to end. Buñuel used what today is considered standard soap-opera forms to convey his radical views about “middle class sexual mores, seducing his audience into absorbing subversive themes with seemingly banal story telling.
My first experience with a Buñuel movie came as a child with “Los Olvidados” (The Forsaken), made during his exile in Mexico from Spain’s Fascist regime and marking one of the highest points of the Golden Era of Mexican cinema. Done in neo-Realist style, Los Olvidados is a faux Dickensian morality tale about a homeless orphan doomed to destruction. Los Olvidados is Oliver Twist turned upside down and inside out.
His eventual and unexpected return to his native country during Franco’s dictatorship was famous (infamous to some) because there he made “Viridiana” a melodramatic comedy about a nun who is seduced and raped by her wealthy uncle played by Fernando Rey. By the time the Spanish censors realized the underlying radical theme smuggled into the film, it was too late to do anything but ban the movie from showing in Spain. It was not publicly seen there until well after Franco’s death. In order to make his film in Spain Buñuel made a deal with the Devil, as it were, and soundly beat him to the delight of many.
It’s not hard to see where contemporary European directors like Pedro Almodovar and Peter Greenaway draw their ideological inspiration. Such films as Dark Habits (Almodovar) and The Draughtsman’s Contract (Greeanaway), just to name two, surely owe to Buñuel’s pioneering film explorations.
Moreover, and more immediately, Buñuel’s movies offer a sound antidote to the maternalism and machismo so prevalent in post-20th Century cinema.
Belle de jour is a film every Marxist interested in cinema should watch, especially in these times, when so many leftists have succumbed to the toxic notion that prostitution is a social phenomenon capable of transcending class-ruled society.