Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
This Catherine Deneuve vehicle, from the same year (1967) as The Young Girls of Rochefort, bristles with infusions from the history of modern thought (particularly Surrealism) and from the history of modern film (particularly Cocteau’s Belle et Bête, Godard’s Breathless and the omnipresent [in French cinema at that period] Kiss Me Deadly). However, to bring some apt tuning to this flurry of disparate visitors, we have to keep our eyes primarily upon Deneuve’s “Severine” as subjecting herself to a spectacular and consequential metamorphosis. As such, the film poses a turning point (easily underestimated) consisting of Severine’s coming upon an acquaintance, “Henriette,” at their tony tennis club. Severine had heard from a friend that Henriette, far from cash-strapped, had begun working as a prostitute, and she herself (married to a wealthy physician) was seen to carefully ponder such a choice of give-and-take activity. (Coming from the courts into the facility, she remarks, “I can’t hit one ball today!”) On showing some interest in having Henriette stop for a while, Severine presents an almost adolescent disarray, rendered more conspicuous by the other woman’s poise in addressing her and moving on. I think that scene offers an opportunity to fix upon the dynamics of her story, and thereby not to succumb to the rampant psychobabble this work tends to elicit.
The opening passage segues, from Severine and her husband, “Pierre,” riding in a horse drawn open carriage on the grounds of an estate (perhaps during the recreation portion of a medical conference), to both of them again, in that same carriage, along a heavily forested roadway, and now (as we learn from her, directly after) in one of her dreams. He tells her, “I love you more every day… I would like everything to be perfect… I feel this coldness from you…”/ “I’m really sorry,Pierre.”/ “I’m troubled for your sake.” At which, her face hardens and she replies, “What good is your care? I’m sorry for you!” Then, with the help of the two teamsters, he drags her from the pleasure craft, has her tied to a high branch, gags her, strips her to the waist and directs his staff to horsewhip her and then to rape her. As she’s being tied up, she cries, “I can explain! I’ll explain everything!” Her husband, soon coming into view as a workaholic medical researcher (a problem solver) having zero tolerance toward ranges of problems so knotted as not to allow of “everything… perfect,” would have made clear to her that “explanation” alone gains his favor. And, in seizing the riposte, “What good is your care?” she alludes to her not being readily inclined to embrace his priorities and, thereby, not being impressed with him as effectively meeting her sense of love. Her sense of love is far from crystalline at this point, and, in a subsequent scene she assures him that she is focused on “you and us… Everything close to you interests me. I wish we were always together…” Their bedroom contains single beds, and the ambiguity of that latter statement, which he misreads as about impingement, irrespective of harmonics, draws him toward her islet with a view to penetration. “No, please,” is her quiet indication that he’s missing something. “I understand,” is his quiet indication that he won’t be devoting time and energy, anytime soon, on behalf of understanding the less obvious aspects of “together.”
On the heels of this static-plagued transmission, there are quick glimpses of other features of the minefield amidst which she steers a deluxe and compromised body unable to hit the open road. At a ski resort, her only thrill is the prospect of a “magician” during après-ski, that is to say, a purveyor of mystery. She claims that such artistry will help her sleep. Pierre thinks to inject some plain talk into this observation, by assuring her she must be referring to the work of a hypnotist, whose recourse to physiology carries some scientific accreditation whereas her enthusiasm for “magic” does not make the grade. Also on hand at this joy centre is a close, idle rich friend of Pierre’s, “Husson” (“He’s interesting”/ “You think so?”), whom she openly detests. (Even his wife tells him, after one of his precious and feeble displays of “sincerity”, “You bore me.”) During a meal at their chalet he goes on about being a student of that problem-solver known as socialism. “I have a special weakness for the poor. I worry about them when it turns cold.” (Later, when the gulf between him and Severine becomes sharply evident, he tells her, “Unlike you, I have principles.”) Back home, at their tastefully furnished flat on theRight Bank, perhaps a bit overextended into antiques, she deliberately drops a vase of long-stemmed red roses at the feet of their maid, having been informed they were a gift from Husson. A few moments later, she accidentally knocks over a bottle of skin cream, a slip accentuating how dry and brittle her motions have become. In the intermittent course of her fending off that unpalatable factor, he does, along lines of watching her with Henriette at the tennis club, inadvertently provide her with the address of a carriage-trade brothel (thinking to scandalize her), where breakaways beyond tantrums against the furniture may be essayed.
During the awkward early days of her tenure comprising performing from 2 to 5 on weekdays only (this being definitely not a run of problematics she could hope to share with classically perfect in every way Pierre), she flubs an assignment with a client who refers to himself as “the Professor” and who insists on interplay with a dominatrix. Severine has been handed the pseudonym “Belle de Jour” by the canny and cordial madam, “Anais,” in light of her restrictedness to mid-day exposure. The French term also covers “daylily,” and eases us into her being measured (however incongruously) in terms of Lily to the Professor’s Soberin, as seen in Kiss Me Deadly. The Professor has a leather case full of whips and other means to pain (but not, in fact, the preferred revolver by which the noir Lily dispatched the bookish and phrase mongering crime lord from far more than a few pretendy minutes). And by this quirky avenue Severine’s strange daring steps into the primal showdown posed for millennia by Pandora’s Box. At the point when this Belle came about, Bunuel had been re-established in Paris—scene of his early succes fou, alongside Dali, as a Surrealist pacesetter—after years of middling exile in North America, and the resort to the New Wave Geiger counter, Kiss Me Deadly, is redolent with positioning his neo-Surrealist entry in such a way as to coincide with New Wave rigor and at the same time to supersede those upstarts with subtleties they hadn’t managed. An episode with a subsequent customer traces this Belle’s initial evolution away from the realm of Lily’s crude appetites pertaining to bulking up on dominant resources. As if cued by her previous predilection for magicians, the new player is a hefty Japanese businessman (expressing his desires and pleasure in Japanese only, here become a strange tone poem as augmented by little bells daintily tinkling from his outstretched hands and burly arms and shoulders) whose bag of tricks includes a little box the ominous buzzing of which terrifies the other two girls in the firm—usually OK with anything. By contrast, Severine finds all this quite amusing, and there is some kind of, perhaps ragged, payoff for both of them. We cut to the aftermath, with Belle face down and motionless on a bed with sheets in disarray. The little cleaning lady commiserates, bemoaning how brutish men are; but a smiling Severine lifts her head and tells her, “You don’t know anything about it.”
The latter transaction makes more specific the presence of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête as an overtone to Belle’s noir-evoking run-in with beasts. The narrative process sets in relief Severine’s sensuous trajectory from high-strung preciousness (Catherine Deneuve a doll in haut couture, accompanied by an every-hair in place intellectual humanitarian Adonis) to mustering a gusto for cosmetically mediocre rogues (including her two colleagues who fail to ruffle her in asking for hand-me-downs from amongst her Pierre Cardin collection) she can join at that juncture where pristine energies show their close kinship to material, sexual frappe or punch. (At the commencement of their partnership the wonderfully feline Anais [courtesy of the splendid Geneviève Page] kisses a nonplussed Severine; at its dissolution, Belle warmly kisses her.) The problematicness of this compelling promiscuity is cinematically spiked by caches replete with not only the delirium of Kiss Me Deadly and Belle et Bête, but also the New Wave (and hence Kiss Me Deadly-addicted) cornerstone, Breathless. While a newsboy calls out, “New York Herald Tribune,” two petty criminals (one in a trench coat) move on to assault and rob a courier of substantial cash, and then move on to Madame Anais’, eliciting “I thought we were rid of him” from the staff in the know. With this run at being Michel, and within the legacy of tough-guy charmers like Bogey, the musical register is flamenco (the regular to the thrills-site being Spanish and in love with his own raspy voice, the new kid on the block, “Marcel,” being French but imagining himself to be some kind of bullfighter). The Unknown Quantity, a dare devil in a black leather coat who packs a deadly temper (quick to draw a dagger on adversaries), enters this arena as, along Belle’s sightlines, a Bête who could be seen to harbor Proustian assets. (By the time of their parting kiss, Anais wants her to keep in touch, to keep their mutually beneficial connection in play, but a now desperately self-protective Belle can’t fathom any point in that. Husson [who speaks of his finding great pleasure in hunting], a different sort of repellent Beast, pursues Belle with a wavering eye upon a mutually beneficial connection; but, as things transpire along lines of savage resentment, that shot is definitely not on the board for her. Nor is the candidacy of self-destructively limitedPierre, racing, as it happens, to a weirdly grotesque conclusion.)
Marcel insists, to his accommodating boss, on having Belle for himself, citing, in accordance with her regal sensual timbre as reflecting a discriminatory striving, “Girls that talk are a bore, anyway.” On noticing a birthmark on her back, he slips into the general attitude of perfectionist Pierre(perhaps assuming from her blue chip wardrobe that she’d be impressed by a show of “good taste;” or perhaps feeling hard-pressed to even the playing field). “Ah, merde! I can’t stand that! Get dressed!” Getting past that childish stunt, they make love, holes in his socks juxtaposed against her gleaming footwear, and she says, “If you want, I won’t charge you.” He tries to see her again but finds she is out of circulation, having been taken to the seashore by Pierre in order to confirm his suspicions that inquietude in her manner indicates that she would be eager to see someone in Paris. (As they walk along the beach [she in black, being a budding Beast to Pierre’s anxious, sheepskin-jacketed Belle], with much polite distemper, in marked contrast to Mike and Velda’s dipping into a primal sea, they play into her grappling [as did Lily] with powers that could backfire.) On Marcel’s rushing to her, now back on the job, she is thrilled to see him, he makes a gesture toward beating her with his belt, and he gets focused on occupying more of her time. “I want to see you at night” (night being the only time Cocteau’s Bête would see Belle).
There is a moment when the two lovers and their bound-to-be-brief association send forth a juxtaposition having the same punch in the gut shock level as that of the earlier Beauty and Beast—she a lovely blonde and he a talking lion with human traces that only add to the malaise. She asks him about his mouthful of steel-piston replacement teeth and he promptly explains he lost his first set by way of a single, explosive blow. The first Belle, formally named Marie in the literature preceding Cocteau, with regard to a chaste presence that also suited the Surrealist firebrand, was, despite being a spunky girl, sickened and terrified by her admirer and only later coming to love him. By the time Severine meets Marcel, she has behind her who-knows-how-long apprenticeship in antidoting the prettiness factors of conjugal ecstasy. That is not to say she links to a going concern in that seriously deranged punk, but the superior preparedness is a factor in her surprisingly resilient weathering of the inevitable debacle, a resilience bearing fascinating comparison with Marie’s rather wilful and pointed irony after her Bête’s death.
Guiding us to this field of concentration are other features of a narrative which shoots forth invasiveness on the order of the maggots populating the scenario of a searching dream she has right after confirming that rewards do indeed come to her within her new vocation. The dream is informed by her no doubt long-standing appetite for grandeur; but it also has been freighted with her anticipation of deadly consequences closing in thereby. At the TuileriesGarden, that well-known carriage brings to her a reverential Duke, intent on engaging her for a night at his chateau. Soon she is playing her part in his obsessive fantasy, a part calling for her to lie in state, wearing a transparent negligee, in a coffin while unseen cats cry out. Like Soberin’s (and Bête’s), his well-worn rhetoric tends heavily toward the melancholic. “Your face is cold… Was it my fault?… Your eyes won’t open again…The smell of dead flowers fills the room… Worms are eating you up…” She feels the coffin shaking, and leans over to see what is happening… Then she is standing by the doors giving an outlook to his magnificent park. A servant grabs her and violently pushes her from that fragile sanctuary, into a thunderstorm, just as Marie is overtaken by a prettified Bête in the form of her home-town admirer and the irredeemable perversity of her siblings. The expectation of disaster in that reverie is soon validated by Husson’s coming by Anais’ porous sanctuary one afternoon, asking, “Whatever became of the Lion Tamer?” On encountering Severine and complimenting her on the “original” name, he refers to the “lily seeds” implicit in her title. Alone with her, he maintains the kind of prissiness to be seen in Soberin (“Now I admirePierre even more”) and leaves her with a new influx of desperation. Not that she hadn’t already digested the collusive bankruptcy and discretely effete viciousness of those fast friends. After her first day in the land of less hypocritical beasts, she dreams of Husson and Pierre having her (dressed in a pure white gown to accord with the way they insist on seeing her) tied to a tree trunk while they shovel black, wet muck into a pail and then shovel it in sharp spurts into her face and onto her lily white gown. During the indignities of that overview, a smile comes to her face.
The violent denouement is entirely in the service of illuminating that smile, that perseverance and traction of her widely perceived madness in upsetting such an enviable apple cart. The crazed predator whose diminutive good side she chose to dwell upon readily finds her dwelling (by this time the imminence of the crash would have fully breached even her recklessness—though, with the maid still present, she smoothly remarks about “catalogues” as if he were some kind of avant-garde designer), notices a photo of Pierre (“He’s better looking than I am,” being his truism for the day), easily yields to her entreaty to get lost and the sound of three gunshots on the street below rouses her from a nap on the sofa. (She had called his bluff about revealing to her husband her undomesticated career—“It will take a load off my mind…”) WithPierreunable to rise from his sleep on the sidewalk, Marcel re-enacts the road kill melodramatic death throes of Godard’s Michel being overmatched by some semblance of sensible power. We are struck, amidst the grotesqueness on the street and the antiseptic stiffness at the hospital wherePierre’s chances for survival look good, by how remarkably supple and alight Belle’s bodily presence and motion have become.
Though a far cry from the Merry Widow, Severine strikes us as arrestingly sanguine and poised in the aftermath of Pierre’s release from the hospital he once presided over. Now blind and totally paralyzed, he sits by a wall of their peaceful living room and she sits near him, attending to her needlepoint and promising, “I’ll read you the news.” Though that would be far more than she could deliver and he could digest, Pierre does receive a bit of yellow journalism from soul-brother Husson, who, being a consummate parliamentarian tells her, “You can’t say I’m a cruel man… I’ll tell Pierreabout you to spare him feeling guilty about being a burden” (he and Pierre being past masters at reflexively sparing themselves from concern about being well-dressed toxic beasts). After Husson leaves to spread his largesse elsewhere, Severine comes to Pierre’s wheelchair and finds him as closed off as a specimen of taxidermy (or, variantly, a stone [pierre], the state Marie’s first beau attains to in running afoul the mysteries of her daring love). She contemplates for a while this standoff. Then there are cats screaming. There are coach bells. There isPierre, taking off his dark glasses, standing up and smiling. There is, then, Belle beholding in him the potential for earthy, poetic, creative actions, and radiantly smiling within that prospect which never did bear fruit in his case (or that of Marcel) but which holds her attention as much for its weird stringency as for its conducting her toward better times. The carriage evoking this reflection is empty. That is not to say it will never be boarded. (She had noted toPierre, “Since your accident, I’ve never dreamed.” The squeeze introduced by Husson turns her to day dreaming, invention on the go. There had been, in tandem with subterranean discoveries at Anais’ “Mode” bordello, some love-making withPierre [at which he efficiently shifted into the theme, “I want a child”]; but she continues to behold him as essentially a mishap. “So much of it I don’t understand,” she says to herself during the entrapment at the beach. But a direction continues to take shape.)
In bringing her newfound composure so hauntingly to bear at this point, Severine enters the sightlines of Cocteau’s Marie, less than enraptured but still smiling in being borne heavenwards by a handsome suitor, clearly a poor second, in her eyes, to the now-deceased Bête (heaven thereby also coming in second to Bête’s uncanny lair). Belle remarks to Pierre in his newfound frozen apoplexy, “Marie has been so nice. She likes you a lot,” and therewith we are confirmed in realizing this Belle is not exactly the one Cocteau envisaged. Severine has impressed various men (and women) along the way with her “aristocratic” bearing and carriage-trade beauty. (Following from that trope are the more advanced articulations of her plight, during the beach scene with Pierre and the bedroom scene with Husson, by then unequivocally hostile invaders. “What I worry about has nothing to do with pleasures. It’s more than that… [her equivocation far from stilled]… I’m lost! I can’t help it! I can’t live without it!”) And in the final scene we come closer to what that means to Bunuel. Another shoe to drop here is implicit in her telling Husson, “He doesn’t speak yet.” What might eventually pop out of Pierre’s mouth could be a more formidable gambit than the box exploding springy toys, given to one of the girls by “M. Adolphe.” It could precipitate a new theatre of world war action for Belle. The radiance of her smile in beholding the vacant seats in the coach alerts us to her readiness for more open roads. Husson sneered at her attire (as Pierre’s attendant) being “precocious schoolgirl.” (He had also deployed classical rational skepticism to denigrate, as “cute compulsion,” the range broached by Henriette.) He would never know just how precocious she had become. Severine generates two very brief reveries in the course of approaching what goes on in there, and they link, in order to allude to the depths of innovation she has engaged. The first, during the turbulent first phase, when rape and ogling were splashed about, recalls her being fondled by a man when she was about six years old. The second, checkmating that portal to glib accounting for “frigidity,” occurs as she approaches Anais’ door to put in her first shift. A slightly older self refuses to take Communion, and thereby a much more comprehensive and unique abnormality introduces itself, an abnormality invoking volcanic sensuality and deft, surreal juxtapositions. Perhaps Anais showed an instinct for such endeavor when she advised Severine, “I want you to be serious,” and yet, “My girls have to be polite and very cheerful.”
