Media: Film
Title: Belle De Jour (1967)
Director: Luis Bunuel
Belle De Jour is the second masterpiece of French cinema I have seen this year. (Rules of the Game being the other.) Looking as beautiful as any one you have ever seen on film, Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, an emotionless, young, upper class wife suffering through the most intense case of ennui. In a way she is similar to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (also 1967). She seemingly has everything (wealth, beautiful doctor husband, ski vacations) and her whole life before her, but she is paralyzed with a feeling of emptiness; and like Hoffman’s Benjamin, she turns to illicit sex to feel something, anything in her barren life. This movie also contains one of the greatest screen thugs in all film. The thug is Severine inversed. He too is young, disillusioned and disconnected from society. But where Severine is inert the thug is perpetually on the knife’s edge of violence. Despite being different in every societal aspect they share at their core a feeling of estrangement from the world, and this draws them to each other.
Belle De Jour deserves multiple viewings and much conversation to fully explore all the themes and ideas saturating this work of art.
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