One of my favorite unanswered questions in all of the movies is this: What
does the Japanese client keep in his box in Belle de Jour?
A little background is in order, in case you're never seen the film. Belle
de Jour is a definitive statement on eroticism, and a deeply personal
experience. Catherine Deneuve gives a flat yet evocative performance as Severine
Sevigny, a virginal newlywed whose everyday life is broken up by masochistic
fantasies in which she's beaten, smeared with filth, and humiliated by a variety
of men. Her husband, Pierre, seems gentle and loving, but Severine remains in
thrall to the idea of less wholesome relationships. When Severine probes one of
her husband's friends for information, he gives her the address of a Parisian
brothel catering to businessmen. Severine dons black hat, coat, and sunglasses,
and wanders through the neighborhood, finally working up the courage to enter
the establishment, where Madame Anais agrees to let her work as a prostitute (Severine is just the right type, she says -- fresh and classy). Because
Severine is insistent that she must be free to leave by evening, Anais christens
her Belle de Jour.
The remainder of the film is broken into episodes, as Severine confronts new
and different clients while living a second life at home. For the most part, the
customers are vaguely repulsive caricatures: the fellow who fancies himself a
ladies' man, and forces himself clumsily on her; "the Professor," a mousy
gynecologist who insists on being scolded, whipped, and trod upon. More
intriguing is the Japanese businessman who carries with him a small box. He
shows the contents to one of the other two prostitutes, who snaps "Not for me,
thanks," and turns away in a hurry. When Severine peeks inside, her eyes grow
wide and we hear a soft whirring noise. "Don't be afraid," she is urged.
When the man leaves, closing the latch once more on his little box, Severine
lies spent, stretched across the bed as the maid tidies her room. She confides
to Severine her understanding of what the prostitutes go through; even the maid
finds men like the Japanese client somewhat frightening. Severine looks up from
the bed with an expression of exhaustion and bliss. "What do you know?"
she spits.
Director and co-screenwriter Luis Bunuel is one of the most subversive of
filmmakers. His career began in 1939, with Un Chien Andalou (An
Andalusian Dog), a classic of Surrealism that he made with artist Salvador
Dali. The first scene featured a razor blade slicing sideways across a woman's
(actually an animal's) eyeball. That most offensive of all images, which creates
an uproar to this day whenever it's shown to a classroom full of first-year film
students, is a challenge to viewers, renewed with each project in Bunuel's long
career. Here, he seems to be at first challenging us to identify with Severine
and her deviances, convincing us to distance ourselves from them, and ultimately
to examine our own responses to her situation.
Bunuel is aided and abetted in this perverse venture by Sacha
Vierny, the
cinematographer who worked with Alain Resnais on Night and Fog,
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad, and who has
lately been salvation for British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose films take
divine advantage of Vierny's cool, stately image-making. A good deal of Belle de
Jour's quiet power comes from the mannered beauty of its compositions, as Vierny
catches the light on Deneuve's face just so.
Eventually, Severine pays a terrible price for pursuing her aberrant
fantasies, and the film could almost be a treatise on the importance of prudence
and fidelity. It's tempting to assume that Bunuel is blaming Severine for giving
in to her own desires and betraying her husband -- blaming Woman for the ruin of
Man. Perhaps he is, but it's maddening to try and prove it. The movie is quite
clearly Severine's story, not Pierre's. Her status as perpetrator of a misdeed is
undermined by her status as a tragic hero (which is bolstered as Bunuel goes out
of his way to develop Severine's character). What's important isn't what Deneuve
gives away in her low-key performance, but what she doesn't show -- the essence
that the audience itself has to fill in. Typically, the director gives us
something more intriguing and revealing than a simple narrative. Bunuel plays
our own judgmental tendencies against our desire for erotic satisfaction, and
leaves us in a quandary.
Which brings us back to one of the great questions of the cinema. What's in
the Asian client's box is the same thing that's in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp
Fiction briefcase. It's the MacGuffin from a dozen different Hitchcock films.
Judging from the look on Deneuve's face as she recovers from its effects, it may
be, like the Maltese Falcon, the stuff dreams are made of.
But as far as dreams go, it's the stuff that's outside the frame that matters.
Our own moral scheme, shaped by personal loves, regrets, and fantasies,
surrounds and permeates Bunuel's deliberately ambiguous value system. Like Greta
Garbo's at the climax of Queen Christina, Deneuve's face is a mask, and
also a receptor for our own emotions. The final truth of this film is that we
are forced to do our own moralizing, if we feel it needs to be done -- no matter
how skillful the intrusion of Bunuel as auteur, Severine's life-changing
experience is unmistakably a function of our own.
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