Luis Buñuel’s film is not just a celebration of protagonist Severine’s penchant for sadomasochism, but it’s also an examination of her desire for it. When we first meet Severine, she’s riding in a carriage with her husband. After some words are exchanged, he violently tears her off and drags her in to the woods. There she’s tied up, whipped, and savaged by his two coachmen, both of whom delight in taking advantage of her. We then see it’s nothing more than a depraved fantasy from a woman who is absolutely bored. As someone who is a part of the elite, who finds herself in the mountains at a ski lodge every weekend, she desires something so much more that money can buy.
Severine is a beautiful young woman married to Pierre, a promising doctor. She loves her husband dearly, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons while remaining chaste in her marriage.
Despite her husband Pierre’s attempts to initiate some kind of intimacy with her, he simply doesn’t have what she wants. And she goes out seeking the adventure and sheer sense of danger that comes with satisfying her kink and fetishes. Catherine Deneuve is absolutely gorgeous as the complex Séverine Serizy, a young twenty something woman stuck in a rut who admittedly goes looking in all the wrong places. Director Buñuel explains a lot of her fetishes and hardcore love for sadomasochism through jarring flashbacks that come and go like a shot.
There’s one particular flashback that alludes to her being molested as a child, but it never quite is used as a reasoning for her need for sexual adventure. When she finds work at a local brothel, this is the beginning of a fulfilling series of adventures that almost always keep her at the edge of a violent complication or two. She is goaded in to working for the alluring Madame Anais, who reveals to her that working in the brothel is everything she wants out of sexual escapades. But this inevitably sinks deeper in to darker realms when she meets the possessive Marcel (Played well by Pierre Clémenti).
“Belle De Jour” doesn’t explicitly explore the sexuality of Severine with gratuitous sex scenes, but through fantasy sequences. These act as allegories for Severine’s inner desires, as well we foreshadowing the inevitability of her dangerous pursuit of pleasure. “Belle De Jour” is such a fascinating and engaging study of satiating sexual appetites, and it ends on a decidedly cryptic note that will arouse interpretation, without a doubt.
Premiering Saturday April 15th at 7pm at the Leather Archives & Museum.