Belle de Jour

Also receiving an honorary Oscar this year is Jean-Claude Carriere, a highly prolific screenwriter who is best known for his collaborations with Luis Bunuel. I'll start with my look at his work with one of his best known films, Belle de Jour.

What is there to say about this film? I'm still not quite sure. It's a film about a prostitute, but it's not sexy, or maybe it's so banal about sex that is it sexy. The heroine has fantasies about being humiliated and degraded, but doesn't seem a very sexual person when she's actually with a man. The depiction of prostitution is as a business (which of course it is), with a madame as kind of a surrogate mother. In many ways, it's very fucked up.

Catherine Deneuve stars as the beautiful wife of a rich and handsome doctor (Jean Sorel). They have separate beds, and her fantasy, which begins the film, has him taking her to the country to be horsewhipped and raped by their servants. The horse-drawn carriage will then recur as a metaphor for her fantasies.

She learns from a friend that another friend is living a double life as a high-end prostitute. Another friend rudely comes on to her and suggests she give it a try, and gives her the address of a house. Intrigued, she goes there, and has to be coaxed into working there. She is given the name Belle de Jour, which means "lady of the day," since she will not work past five o'clock so she can be home for her husband.

What we see inside the house is a bunch of oddballs with strange fetishes, like the professor who likes to pretend to be a servant and gets beaten for bad behavior (Deneuve is with him, but she is not forceful enough and he says she belongs in the kitchen). Later she will form an attachment with a ruthless gangster, who will stake a claim over her. This man (Pierre Clementi) will drive the plot forward toward a quasi-tragic ending.

Bunuel directs with an almost clinical approach. The photography, sets, and costumes are mostly of neutral colors (the fantasies are of a more vivid richness), and Deneuve seems bored through the whole thing, which I think is the point. This film is really about a woman who is bored, and prostitution is a hobby she tries, like knitting or a book club. Viewed through a lens of 45 years (it was released in 1967) it's not really shocking, but I don't think Bunuel or Carriere meant to shock anybody. I think, and I may be quite wrong, that this film is about the banality of professional sex, a kind of spin off Hannah Arendt's maxim about the banality of evil. But it's quite open to interpretation, and is never boring, even though there are scenes of a highly quotidian nature.