New Movies: Belle de Jour

French Actress Catherine Deneuve is only 24, but she is already a veteran of 22 films in which she has been seduced almost as often as Bardot. She is also France's fastest-rising female star, and is currently on view in the U.S. in three thoroughly dissimilar films. Benjamin is a frivolous froth of a costume piece, dedicated to the proposition that upper-class sex in 18th century France was frisky, witty, pretty and piquant. The Young Girls of Roche fort, a disappointing follow-up to Jacques Demy's ethereal The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is a treacly dollop of banality. But Belle de Jour is Bufiuel.

Spanish Director Luis Bufiuel is 68, deaf and an acknowledged alcoholic; he has claimed that this—his 27th picture—will be his last. True or not, Belle de Jour is a fitting capstone to the curious career of an unpopular but near-legendary film maker whose favorite themes have been anticlericalism, madness, fetishist fantasies and the wilder frontiers of sex. The Belle of this story is the masochistic wife of a successful young Parisian doctor who finds relief from her marital frigidity by working part-time in a whorehouse—not for conventional kicks but for the delicious indignities involved. Since other directors have long since surpassed Bufiuel when it comes to on-screen presentation of sex, most audiences will not find anything visually shocking about Belle de Jour. They will find instead a cumulative mystery: What is really happening and what is not?

Interior Arrangements. The film opens with a slow, evocative long shot of an open coach moving through the autumn leaves along the driveway of an estate. In the back sits Severine (Catherine Deneuve) and her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). They exchange affectionate pleasantries. Abruptly he orders the landau stopped; the coachman and footman drag Severine screaming through the woods, strip her half-naked, string her up to a tree and whip her. Suddenly the scene shifts and she is in her bed, chaste and composed. "What are you thinking about?" asks Pierre. "About us," she says. "We were in a coach ..."

So the film continues—switching back and forth between Severine's real and fantasy worlds so smoothly that after a while it becomes impossible to say which is which. Obviously she doesn't really disappear under the restaurant table with her husband's libertine friend and a broken wine bottle. But what about the episode in the flower-filled coffin at the duke's chateau? Or the exquisitely painful encounter with a fat, sadistic Japanese who tries to pay for her services with a Geisha Club credit card? Does her uncommonly cuckolded husband really spend the rest of his life blind, mute and paralyzed after an attack by her gangster lover? Or is that merely another of Severine's interior arrangements?

There is no way of knowing—and this seems to be the point of the film with which Bufiuel says he is winding up his 40-year career. Fantasy, he seems to be saying, is nothing but the human dimension of reality that makes life tolerable, and sometimes even fun.