I’ll never forget the first time I saw Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour. It was on television and it was showing as part of a Bunuel season on BBC2. That was back in the good old days when TV channels like BBC and Channel Four would actually put on director retrospectives and screen films like Godard’s Weekend. (My memories of seeing THAT film as an………ahem…….teenager, will be the topic of another post).
I was so innocent in my film-watching then that I didn’t even realise some of the sequences were fantasies! I just knew that I was seeing stunningly crafted images and sonic effects that I’d never seen or heard before. Why WAS there a constantly recurring sound of bells ringing? What WAS the significance of the recurring motif of the coach and horses? What actually happened at the end? And why DO characters say something about bringing on the cats?
Now, all these years laters, I can at least have a stab at answering some of these questions. Maybe that indicates a growing maturity. Every time I see the film I feel I understand it a bit more, like a diamond that reveals a different facet every time I look at it but its depth can never be fully revealed.
The mastery of this film is the way in which it portrays and contrasts the exterior and interior worlds of its main character, played by Catherine Deneuve. She was ideal casting because she is the epitome of ice-cool. So on the surface she’s all frigidity, staidness and primness. But she has a rich interior life which consists of sado-masochistic fantasies. These fantasies are signalled by the sound of bells ringing. These sounds are sometimes diegetic (inside the film) and other times non-diegetic (outside the film). At one point one of her clients in the brothel actually starts ringing some bells which would imply that the following scene is fantasy, however it is never entirely clear. What I think happens is that the external and internal worlds start to bleed into each other more and more as the film goes on.
The ending of the film is haunting because it leaves it open as to whether her husband has recovered or not. We see the wheelchair earlier in the film and her husband sees this on the street in a kind of premonition. Without giving too much away, the wheelchair is present in the final scene. Which may or may not be part of her fantasy. It is likely that she has simply imagined him recovering but one cannot say for sure.
Flashbacks are also used occasionally, including one in which we see her as a child being abused by a relative. Which implies that possibly she is punishing herself in her fantasies as a form of atonement for being defiled as a child. Or maybe as a result of the abuse she equates love with pain and therefore has the masochism internalised, due to not being able or allowed to express it in the external world.
I would also suggest that Bunuel is peeling away the veneer of bourgeois society by showing that the civilized behaviour on the surface is merely a front. One could see it as the difference between the conscious and the unconscious. Bunuel is a master at showing the unconscious seething away beneath the surface of the conscious world. Not just in this film, but all his films. (Which must have been an influence on Lynch).
And as for the sound of cats———-I’m still working that one out.