Belle de Jour (1967)

 Luis Bunuel's "Belle de Jour"

In 1966, Luis Bunuel was tasked to adapt the scandalous 1928 Joseph Kessel novel "Belle de Jour" into a feature-length film. The only problem was that Bunuel found the novel detestable, calling it "a bit of a soap opera." However, he accepted because he wanted the challenge of turning something he didn't like into something he did like. He kept the same basic structure of the novel but changed many things to align with common themes held within his oeuvre. The result, 1967's "Belle de Jour," was not only a box office success in France, but is now considered one of the most iconic French films of all time.

The film stars France's most celebrated actress from the 20th century, Catherine Deneuve, as a bored middle-class housewife named Severine who decides to spend her days as a prostitute while he husband, Pierre, is at work. The more she gets inundated in the work, the more bizarre and depraved the men who hire her become. Eventually, one street thug becomes too obsessed with her, which causes a confrontation at her home. This leads to her husband being shot and the street thug killed by police. At the end of the film, her husband is confined to a wheelchair, unable to move or speak. Severine must take care of her husband while he holds the knowledge of what she was doing behind his back but unable to do anything but cry. That is until, in typical Bunuel fashion, things all of a sudden go back to normal. Pierre stands up and asks her if she wants to go skiing in the mountains to which she agrees.

There are two different ways to view this ending. Firstly, one could argue that the whole film was entirely in the subconscious mind of Severine. If you are familiar with Bunuel, you know how often he loved to criticize the upper-class and their pretensions sentiments, often using his films to demonstrate how flimsy their perspectives are and just how prone they are to their animalistic impulses; no different than the rest of humanity. In this scenario, Bunuel seems to be taking on the middle-class, as opposed to the upper-class. This middle-class criticism seems to demonstrate their innate dissatisfactory with their everyday lives. Severine is a stay-at-home housewife and becomes so restless that she chooses to prostitute herself; something her lower-class comrades are forced to do out of necessity. It goes without saying that Bunuel iterates throughout the film Severine's innate inclination towards being sexually debased. However, due to the unspecified nature of what elements of the film are a dream and what are not, it is difficult to unravel the factual basis of Severine's circumstances. What is certain is that Severine is a stay-at-home housewife to Pierre. Everything else that happens in the film is subject to projection from Severine's subconscious. Therefore, it stands to reason that the majority of the film is a middle-class fever dream. This fever dream demonstrates how much our contemporary middle-class society longs for punishment and/or to be debased, thereby shattering the middle-class comfort they stand on. In this interpretation, Bunuel is mocking the concept of the middle-class and alluding to their own secret fantasy of punishment and self-destruction.

The second way you can interpret the ending is that the whole film, aside from the obvious dream sequences, was reality and the ending was an imagined scenario by Severine, wishing things to go back to the way they were. In this circumstance, the concept of middle-class guilt does not change. The only thing that changes is that Severine actually did act on these restless impulses, which ends up causing her life and the life of everyone around her to spiral. This scenario still offers the same critique regarding the middle-class desiring punishment, only Severine enacts this punishment to its ultimate conclusion. The only thing that changes is the viewer's perception of their own engagement with the story. As Bunuel points out later, the ending of the film is intentionally ambiguous and it is up to the viewer to establish their own sense of meaning. Was it better to have had everything be a dream so that her perfect middle-class life goes unaffected in actuality? Or is it better that Severine lived out her impulses and became, in a sense, free, even though it caused ultimate consequences? If the viewer decides that the whole film is a dream to save the middle-class life and marriage, then they seem to value that middle-class existence. If they decide Severine's adventures are, in fact, reality, then it goes to show that they too desire this liberation from the restraints of middle-class respectability. After all, Bunuel makes a point to point out the hypocrisy of these middle-class pretentions. This is done through the character of Husson, who first introduces Severine into the world of prostitution, only to judge her for it in the end and ultimately inform on her to Pierre. He boasts about the women he hires for sex work, only to turn around and issue judgement on Severine. Like in many of his films, Bunuel always points out the utter hypocrisy of the ruling class, the church, and even the middle-class in this film. 

Regardless of how you interpret the ending, it seems as though that point of fact is completely indifferent to the main notions of the film. Severine, along with all the other characters in the story, seem to desire a sense of debasement. Whether its the man who wants to be abused and stepped on, the man who masterbates to his dead daughter's corpse, or Severine who desires to be whipped and raped, as well as have mud thrown on her along with an assortment of brutal punishments, each character desires to be punished and more importantly, debased. This is a running theme in Bunuel's work, as he often demonstrates how much humanity has pent-up impulses. These impulses often run counter to the pristine and established order we've socially constructed for ourselves. This means that these socially established institutions are inherently counter to our very humanity. With "Belle de Jour," he uses the middle-class as a construction of their own hypocrisy, held daintily up by a feeble and weak foundation that is destined to tear itself down. 

"Belle de Jour" is considered by many to be a masterpiece, often being cited as one of the greatest films emerging from France in the 1960s. At the time, many of the explicit things happening in the film were controversial and audacious. Once again, Bunuel was able to push buttons and rattle some cages. On top of this, he was able to continue in his surrealist criticism of humanity's feeble social constructs and their absurd hypocrisy.