Belle de Jour

Sex in Cinema

As much as sex in films has blossomed the last twenty years or so into a ubiquitous necessity, few films are as erotic or knowing as BELLE DE JOUR, a pleasantly perceptive film by the surrealist Luis Buñuel in 1967. Despite the film being devoid of explicit sex, there's a more meaningful unpleasantness about watching certain intimacies in the film.
Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) is a housewife to a wealthy young surgeon. She is a virgin, and even though she's been married to the surgeon for a year, she hasn't had sex with him. She seems timid, but she is truly just unsatisfied with her marriage. She fantasizes at the beginning of the film of being strewn from a carriage ride with her husband and whipped. Later, she fantasizes at the prompting of a cat's meow, or of the sounds of clip-clops. Séverine is not a timid woman, but one who requires this sort of danger, or odd eroticism to get off. She decides at the musing of a friend to become a prostitute by day. Her husband knows nothing of it, but Séverine willingly becomes Belle de Jour. She is unwieldy at first in her position, but quickly finds it a necessity. One day when a couple of gangsters come in, Séverine is especially taken by a steel mouthed, ugly Marcel who she refuses to even charge. She uses him for sexual pleasure, for the idea that she is in some duress in the same way that she is prompted to think about being whipped by her husband. There is the constant danger, as well, that her husband will discover her. But she continues her work because it's a part of her sexual necessity.
With no explicitness, the film is truly affecting because it knows that people have erotic desires / thoughts. The fact that these are strange here (ahem, cat's meow anyone?) is only to underline the fact that other people's fetishes are quite possibly stranger, but nevertheless, a necessity.
Here is a rigorously controlled film that focuses upon rigorously affecting necessities that result in messiness. A delight.
Belle de Jour: ★★★ 1/2