Catherine Deneuve is stunningly beautiful with her piled up brassy blonde hair and could be any male’s fantasy. But in this 1967 Louis Buñuel film, Belle de Jour, all the fantasizing is done by Séverine Serizy, played with an anguished aplomb by a young Deneuve. And the fantasy isn’t about your run-of-the-mill housewife variety that one might expect from a respectable young Parisian married to a doctor. It’s about violence, humiliation, degradation and rape.
Séverine and Pierre are in a seemingly happy and loving marriage and although the marriage is a year old it hasn’t been consummated. There are tantalizing flashbacks into the life of Séverine as a young girl which shed some light on this reluctance to physical intimacy but we never know for sure. The sterile and chaste separate beds make for a sharp contrast to the erotic dreams of Séverine. In to this mix is thrown the aging, leonine Husson; purportedly a family friend but who pursues Séverine with a reckless abandon, and then, in conversation, gives her the address of a brothel where she starts to work every afternoon.
Séverine comes into contact with stereotypical johns at Madame Anais. There’s the large Asian man (with an unnamed creature in a box); the bumbling French salesman; the distinguished professor who’s into S&M. But tragically, and quite implausibly, she forms an attachment with a violent young gangster named Marcel, a more repelling character with his scrawny frame and metallic teeth is hard to imagine. All this, of course, ends in tears.
This movie must have seemed daring and avant-garde in the sixties but now it only looks aged and tired. The real problem is that of motivation or rather the lack of it. We can’t really believe that the Deneuve character would behave thus. There are no compelling reasons; there is no drama, and the tension is for all the wrong reasons.