Don't let the cats out

With his retrospective now over, the Pierre Clémenti adoration posts will probably be coming to a halt lest I somehow get my hands on his filmography (no small feat in the US). Or my rental of The Leopard shows up and I can talk about how odd it is seeing him blonde and clean-cut.

That being said, I wrangled up a few friends to come with me to Anthology's second showing of Belle de Jour. A few scrolls down tells you I've recently rented it, but again it was proven that DVD home viewings, regardless of how clear they are, can never live up to their theater counterparts. I'd completely overlooked just how good Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli were in it. Most of its odd humor had been completely missed and seeing it at Anthology only reinforced how significant Clémenti is as Marcel. I might be biased or maybe it was because I knew what was coming, but when he first showed up onscreen, you could literally feel the movie completely shift. In my opinion, Belle de Jour is a nice little gem, but Marcel ends up pushing it into new territory due to Clémenti's energy.

It was nice to know that my friends enjoyed the movie. I made a Clémenti fan out of my best friend. Another friend preferred Jean Sorel and couldn't understand how my calling his character a Ken doll was an insult. My third friend compared Clémenti to André the Giant, physically. If you understand this, please comment.

Small note: The version screened had different subtitles than the DVD's. White, and not nearly as inclusive (though what's cut is primarily small talk), they were also italicized at times to distinguish reality from Séverine's dreams. Takes a bit of the fun out, no? Sometimes knowing French has its perks, I guess.

Let's end this with a little list of Clémenti movies I'm anxious to see and some clips:

Benjamin, Il Gattopardo (though his role is quite minor), Wheel of Ashes, Le lit de la vierge, Les Idoles. He was in much more, but these would be my first stops.




(don't even get me started on this movie)

Bonus: This is from Sweet Movie, which apparently tests the "eww" limits, but I'd be up for it. This is precious:



Up next, Bigger Than Life!

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.