Belle de Jour Reviews

The titular character is a mix between a Hitchcock icy blonde, a Bond Girl and someone from a Tinto Brass movie. Soft, sensual and erotic: these are the three things Belle de Jour is made up of. This is my first time viewing of Catherine Deneuve and I must say, her performance was rather impressive. The supporting were just decent but I enjoyed Genevieve Page as Madame Anais and, to a little extend, Michel Piccoli as Henri Husson.

Since this is directed by Luis Bunuel, it cannot be interpreted in 10 minutes flat. You have to have a notepad ready to keep a track of the notes and even then you will only understand like 50% of it. What's the significance of cats' meow? What do the carriages represent? What the hell was the ending all about? I guess, the intro, which is shown as a dream, is actually the event that happens after when the film ends... that's my thought... oh well, forget it!

Anyhow, Severine's (the titular character) dark looks and easy on the eye figure will leave you transfixed but you might find it a little boring. I liked her performance but I think I will pass off the film...

7.0/10

The performance that Catharine Deneuve gives in Belle de Jour is the kind of performance that makes you love film and appreciate the art of acting. As a bored housewife who engages in high-class prostitution, who may or may not have an extreme interest in BDSM, Deneuve makes like the greatest of the Hitchcock blondes without actually having been one.

Deneuve’s unknowable, unreadable face is a porcelain thing of immaculate beauty. Despite the film being told strictly from her point-of-view, we know very little about her. Perhaps she knows little about herself, perhaps she is concerned with projecting the artifice and ashamed of her surreal, blackly comic fantasy world. She has a husband, but he exists on the periphery. He cannot, and does not, know about her elaborate constructs, so she has no use for him besides social propriety. What do the constant cat’s meows mean? Am I supposed to have a gut reaction each time a carriage bells begins to ring? I have no real theory about the cat’s meow, but the carriage bells always made my gut churn with the prominent fear that something bad was about to happen, some strange fantasy was about to unfold which would confuse and confound me. This is a film about eroticism that knows much of erotica comes from the imagination, not the physical acts, which can be fun but are generally messy affairs.

There is much to admire about Bunuel’s film, but the thing that struck me the deepest in my viewing experience was the performance at the heart of the film. Or, as Premiere magazine put in their 100 Greatest Performances of All Time introduction: “We love great movies for everything they've got going for them…we feel the most electric connection to them—when the actors look out from that big screen and hook into us. They make us believe that they're the people they're playing….” Truer words have never been spoken. (Belle de Jour made the list at number 59.)

Sob perfeito tagline de “Luis Bunuel’s Masterpiece of Erotica!“, o substancioso e fascinante Belle de Jour (1967).

Numa narrativa inquietante, a jovem Catherine Deneuve, ímpar na pele de Severine, é esposa de um cirurgiao a quem ama mas rejeita sexualmente enquanto nutre pensamentos eróticos e escapistas, até que sua inquietude e insatisfaçao a conduzem diariamente a uma maison no período em que seu marido está no trabalho: A Bela da Tarde, altergo realizador de suas fantasias.

Entre seus clientes um industrial masoquista, um asiático sodomista, um duque necrófilo, e o jovem marginal Marcel, personagem que seria um antecessor de Alex Delarge, exceto pela misoginia do protagonista de Laranja Mecanica (1971), mas igualmente contraventor e volátil que se apaixona doentiamente por Belle de Jour. Esse automatismo surrealista de Marcel, ainda que de forma desesperadoramente violenta e gratuita, acaba por sublimar a liberdade de Severine e salvar seu casamento.