Buiiuel's last stand ARTS
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Luis Bufiuel has said that Belle de Jour will be his last film. He is sixty-seven, very deaf, and there can hardly be more cinematic worlds to conquer. The cinema hasn't so many great men that it can afford to look with equanimity on the retirement of one of the greatest; and it's the harder to imagine films without Bufitiel because there is no replacement for this talent on the horizon, and no one else who can still link the surrealist 'twenties with the open-ended 'sixties. And yet, in another part of one's mind, one half hopes that he sticks to his decision. Paradox may be part of his nature, but not, surely, the urge to any prima donna series of farewells: the declared last should be the last. And if Belle de Jour (Curzon, 'X') never looks remotely like the end of a career, it could very well be seen as a film to end a career with.
One's tempted to call it a masterpiece and have done with it. Yet, in a context that includes Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel, I'd hesitate. Both these films were rougher, more flawed, but there, was the excoriating, Swiftian Bufiuel. Belle de lour has the almost daunting, fragile flawlessness of the perfect crystal—a staggering, commanding piece of film-making rather than a great film. Maybe it's a hair- splitting distinction, and certainly it risks trap- ping one in futile arguments about form and content. Though in a sense, perhaps, the allur- ingly immaculate form of Bufitiel's film could be said to spring from a somewhat caustic atti- tude towards its theme.
Butluel has said, grandly and characteristic- ally, that he doesn't think much of the Joseph Kessel novel, now almost forty years old, on which it's based. He has stripped it of psycho- logical varnish: lightning, as usual in Buiiuel, now strikes from a clear surrealist sky. But still this story of Sev&ine the pretty bourgeoise— loving but cold wife of a rich, gentle and hard- working surgeon, who becomes Belle de Jour, two-to-five star of the brothel at 11 Rue Jean de Saumur, and so learns to love her husband all the more—has not quite shed that ineradic- able French affection for a kind of neatness and knowingness. One is aware of degrees of stage-management: in, for instance, the way Severine's husband Pierre (Jean Sorel) is kept obligingly hovering. Buriuel's familiar fetishes, and obsessions—from the polished patent leather to the necrophiliac nobleman—seem to be introduced, some impishly and some gravely, almost like a contained criticism of the artifices of a more sentimental fiction.
Elements of the novel, perhaps, provide the tension-creating irritant: the grit that makes the pearl. The end of the dramatic action, for in- stance, looms like a third act for a too well made play. Severine's two worlds collide, when her husband is shot by a hysterical, doting young gangster in storm-trooper's black leather; Pierre, now paralysed, is told by a very equivo- cal friend of the family how Severine has been spending her afternoons. But this preposterous pile-up isn't, of course, Bufiuel's conclusion. The film's last scene opens up infinite permuta- tions of possible endings, victories of fact over fantasy, fantasy over fact. As a final enigma, mysterious as the card-game at the end of Viridiana, it's more enthralling (as well as more entrancing) than any of the mystifications in Bergman's Persona.
Bergman in Persona is concerned to make us aware of the artist's difficulty: the apparatus of the cinema enters, the film, with constant re- minders that what the camera says isn't evi- dence. Bufiuel similarly interlocks fantasy, dream, memory and the present. But his film is so lucid, his transitions so effortless, that one feels one is looking down at the characters through absolutely still, clear water. There's a sense of distance, remoteness, a mirrored world. At the end, a steadily widening ripple stirs the surface—and the circle of the film is complete. The first shot of Belle de Jour is of an open car- riage moving sedately through autumn woods, harness jingling, two coachmen on the box. Sdverine and Pierre are out driving. Suddenly, he stops the carriage, has the servants drag out his wife, tie her to a tree, gag and beat her. Cut from this first of Severine's hopeful fantasies to the loving couple in their Paris flat. And in the film's last shot, as Severine looks out of the window in Paris, the coach (it has reappeared, meanwhile, in a sensationally Bufiuelian epi- sode) is again jingling down the Country lane. The difference is that this time there are no passengers. Make of it what you will.
One dwells on the ending, rather than on the scabrous comedy of afternoons chez Madame Anais (including the oriental gentleman with sinisterly humming box and the determination to pay by Geisha Club credit card), because here the devious fascination of the film is summed up. Catherine Deneuve, cool, inward- looking, palely blonde, Alice through the Look- ing Glass, is perfectly cast as Severine. She moves through the film as if caught in a trance. Like Alice, she asks questions but accepts an- swers: she is impervious to surprise. 'Curiouser and curiouser,' would seem to be her detached reaction to what she finds out about herself. Imagine the part played any other way—with either emotion or analysis creeping in—and the mirror of the film would shatter, leaving jagged glass and an impossible case history.
The film is dispassionate, like Bufluel's own comment: 'Belle de Jour is a pornographic film . . . by that I mean chaste eroticism.' There's an almost severe precision in the imagery. Severine may live partly in fantasy, but it's Bwinel's uncluttered mind that she inhabits. He has spent so much of his film-making career working quickly, against the odds, that he has scarcely had time—even if he had ever had the inclination—to develop the defences of com- plexity. But here he surpasses himself. Dialogue (by Builuel and Jean-Claude Carriere) is spare; camerawork (by Sacha Vierny) always impec- cable, and in a few landscapes romantically beautiful. A receptive cast, notably Genevieve Page as the circumspect, Madame Anais and Pierre Clementi as the fatal gangster, keeps the razor-blade style at its sharpest.
Unexpectedly, I find myself thinking of Hitchcock, and his power to direct the audience as well as the film, by the same mesmerising force of suggestion. One particular sequence in Belle de lour, that of Severine's trembling, ten- tative first visit to Rue Jean de Saumur, is actu- ally shot much as Hitchcock might do it,. to
convey the same sense of reluctance and in- evitability—except that in a Hitchcock film the heroine would find a corpse or a murderer at the top of the stairs. And, of course, there's the obvious pleasure both directors find in putting immaculate blondes through tantalising ordeals. Perhaps the comparison is subliminally rein- forced by BuiSuers own Hitchcockian role in Belle de Jour. He's to be seen sitting at a café table in the scene where Severine keeps her appointment with the Duke. And his appear- ance at this particular moment, just before the most allusively Builuelian scene of them all, is perhaps not entirely without forethought.
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