Belle de jour

To mark the screening of Belle toujours, the masterful new film by Manoel De Oliveira (98), the festival is very pleased to screen Belle de jour from 1967, Buñuel’s most successful film, which he made when he was already 67 years old. Partly because it can never do any harm to refresh the memory, partly because Belle toujours evokes new interpretations of a film that is ideally suited to many interpretations.
The story of Belle de jour, in short, is that of the newlywed Sévérine (played by Deneuve) who is frigid in her marriage but satisfies her sexual urges as a prostitute in a brothel in the afternoons in an increasingly perverse way. In Buñuel’s film, it is not possible to say whether events are real or have emerged from her fantasy, but he does give an explanation (in Sévérine’s childhood) for her predilection for bondage and masochism – things in which her husband (Sorel) is not interested, unlike her clients. Michel Piccoli plays a crucial role in the last scenes of this masterpiece as Henri Husson: he was the family ‘friend’ who sent Sévérine looking for the brothel. And does he now give away Sévérine’s secret at the end or not to the now paralysed and dumb husband? Maybe we’ll tell you some other time. (GT)