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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.)
