But you're not a woman

I told myself that I was going to wait to see Belle de Jour until the Clémenti retrospective, but June feels really far away and I wanted to rent it pretty badly. I was slightly disappointed, but not too much.

Catherine Deneuve has never been one of my favorites. She was beautiful in her youth and is aging well, yes, but that doesn't mean I find her particularly interesting. I respect the humanitarian and feminist work she's done, but sometimes you love actors and actresses and sometimes you don't. I don't have anything against her, but I'm not fascinated by her either (okay, I love her in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, but that's an exception). Here's a gratuitous Muppets shot:



All useless rambling aside, I found her pretty good in this. Belle de Jour is very tame by today's standards, but in 1967 the idea of a bored housewife with explicit masochistic sexual fantasies must've been groundbreaking. She's maybe 23/24 in this, so accepting the role was risky and I can respect her for that. There is this risk of the timid woman not happy with her sweet husband because he's not abusing her, but I think it's a stretch here. It definitely falls into the "bad boy" attraction crap, but Séverine knows when to draw the line with Marcel's obsessive behavior and I don't know many other movies of this era that deal with a woman's sexuality both so explicitly and with respect. You never get the idea that Buñuel is judging his protagonist for her preferences. Also Deneuve's Yves Saint-Laurent wardrobe is gorgeous.




Pierre Clémenti, on the other hand, is one of my all-time favorites. His role as Marcel gets a lot less screen time (maybe 30 minutes) than I'd thought, but he laps it up. You're drawn to Deneuve throughout the film, but whenever she's onscreen with Clémenti, he completely steals the scene from her. I think this is his best known performance and the last mainstream one for quite some time. His character is disgusting (and those TEETH), but he's really excellent and hammy in this. And what a sassy dresser! Oh and Michel Piccoli also is good as always.

The bored housewife theme is definitely nothing new, but this approach to it must've been back in the day. Buñuel's "surrealism" in this isn't nearly as interesting today as it was then. I've heard of people describing Belle de Jour as blurring the line between fiction and reality, but I found Séverine's fantasies to be quite distinctive from her everyday life. Also, judging from the US trailers (both the 1960s one and the re-release one) it was promoted as softcore porn here in the States, which is not only an insult to the movie, but complete bullshit. I didn't find Belle de Jour to be phenomenal, but it was enjoyable, with good performances, and it was far more than a skin flick.

In other news, I'm an hour into Jeanne Dielman and it is AMAZING. I'll be done with it this weekend and will write about it sometime next week, I'd imagine.