Belle du Jour (1967)

[Mr Blonde]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061395/

Catherine Deneauve plays an upperclass woman who is not satisfied by her wealthy husband and has an active imagination. Eventually she goes to work in a brothel under the supervision of a forceful madam. Although she certainly doesn't need any money, she acts out her clients' fantasies and is in steady demand because of her blueblood appearance/demeanor.

I guess this movie appealed to me because I prefer dating white-collar, well-educated and professional looking women. There is a scene where Deneauve's character is unable to flog a submissive man but she does take a double flogging from two men. I also liked the scene where she fantacizes about being tied up while men fling mud in her face and call her whore/slut/etc.

This movie will seem tame by today's standards but I still found it interesting.

(Yes, I know it's debatable about what is real or imagined but I am just generally reacting to the movie.)

 

[AngelicAssassin]

Didn't they have a modern remake of this in the last 5-10 years?

 

[catalina_francisco]

I have the book but haven't seen the movie. Haven't read it for awhile, but enjoyed it each time I picked it up again, most likely because there was more to it than porn scene after porn scene instead engaging the psychological to some extent, the personal risk, the fear and the pleasure.

Catalina

 

[Pure]

I don't at all think it's tame by today's standards. Bunuel, tame?

This is the era of 'Bridges of Madison County.'

 

[Mr Blonde]

I am not sure if there is a recent remake or not. I understand the novel was first published in 1927 and is written in French. I searched to see if a translation was available and the details were very sketchy. What book do you have, Catalina?

 

[AngelicAssassin]

I am not sure if there is a recent remake or not. I understand the novel was first published in 1927 and is written in French. I searched to see if a translation was available and the details were very sketchy. What book do you have, Catalina?

Pretty sure of it now, just have to find it among all the blogs by the same name.

Interestingly, the original movie had a copyright issue.

 

[catalina_francisco]

I am not sure if there is a recent remake or not. I understand the novel was first published in 1927 and is written in French. I searched to see if a translation was available and the details were very sketchy. What book do you have, Catalina?

Wil have to wait until it is unpacked again......is not the original that is for sure, has nice photo on the front which may have been from the movie. Bought it second hand about 10 years ago from memory.

Catalina

 

[Pure]

Just to clarify, for the novel, I have two refs, just below.

{{Corrected}} However, in English, one book called 'Belle de Jour' --see article below--is a study of the movie and of Bunuel's other movies; it is by Wood.

The movie is called "Belle de Jour." I can find no reference to a re-make [as opposed to re-issue] of the movie.

{{Correction: Besides the study 'Belle de Jour,' discussed below, there is a book, likely an English translation of Kessler's novel, see amazon ref., below.}}


[Kes29] Kessel, Joseph, 1929
Belle de Jour Publisher: Gallimard, Paris Language: French

[Kes68] Kessel, Joseph, 1968
La belle du jour Publisher: Desch, München Language: German
{{Apparently a re-issue, just after the movie}}



from http://www.datenschlag.org/english/bisam/author/k.html

BDSM/fetish bibliography, sorted by author: K




{{Another possibility is that there is a book in English which is an English translation of the *screenplay* of the movie. I don't know. Or a French book, which is the original screenplay, not the novel.}}




http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/01/19/belle.html

Belle de Jour
(BFI Film Classics, London, 2001),
by Michael Wood Book
review by Jonathan Dawson
Jonathan Dawson is Associate Professor in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Griffith University (Queensland, Australia). He has written and directed scores of films and television series and documentaries.
Belle de Jour


Luis Buñuel's movies, beginning of course with Un Chien Andalou (1928), that ur-surrealist film for all seasons, defy category, logic, good taste and 'common' sense. They are, quite simply, unique. It's amazing how he kept getting the money! But the simple fact is that Buñuel's infrequent movies nearly always made a profit in Europe alone. He was, quite simply, as bankable as the High Art that rich corporations so love to hang in their boardrooms.

Like Woody Allen he always seemed to be able to raise the monies for his latest assault on the bourgeoisie while stalking the gallery openings and premieres like any other hipster of the demi-monde. Though as his work grew more and more willful and whimsical – as charted by Michael Wood in this elegantly visual book – some of his former audiences deserted him for younger sensations, mistrusting perhaps his very bottle-age: for when he made Belle du Jour he was 67, two thirds of a century old.

Wood's argument is that Buñuel, through all his careers shifts, was essentially both ageless and consistent and that his 'late period' really began with Belle du Jour. Buñuel died 16 years later but not before creating another six excellent movies, all in colour, and including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (the perfect Buñuel title?) in 1972 and ending with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

The BFI Film Classics are a curious phenomenon, seeming to be a late flowering of British dilettantism but stylishly set in the stone of a new, glossier format and valorised by footnotes, bibliographies and other appurtenances of the scholarly. Yet the style and varied approaches, from literary (Rushdie) to academic cool (Brian Winston on Fires were Started) of the series is, idiosyncratic, relaxed scholarship aside.

Michael Wood's book of course doesn't concern itself with such crudities as film finance; this is more like a gallery catalogue at times, combining great stills with writing that veers between the cool, the analytical and the lush – almost in the tradition of Buñuel 's latter day screen world of gorgeous images and rich colours laid over complexly patterned and obscurely troubling writing. [...] Belle du Jour arises from an earlier more academic project on Buñuel's life and work that was abandoned at the time.

In a revealing interview with Noel King, Wood explains how he had narrowed his focus given the smaller frame of the monograph form. However, he hoped to end up by producing: ...some account of the film's production history, its relation to the Joseph Kessel novel, so that it would match the rest of the [BFI] series.

The other thing that I thought I could do was use that space to try to figure out the ending of Belle de Jour. Buñuel claims that there are not two endings, there is just one ambiguous ending. I think he's right in one sense and wrong in another. It doesn't seem quite tenable to think that there is only one ending. (King and Wood extract p.1) Wood is concerned to get right down to it though. Quoting Buñuel, “I don't like psychology...(but) it goes without saying that reading Freud and the discovery of the Unconscious meant a lot to me in my youth”. And he is keen to play off this nicely setup disclaimer against the evidence of the movie: “What does it mean to remember Freud and not like psychology. One answer would be that it meant making Belle du Jour.” (45) Neat!

Wood is nothing if not concerned to discuss endlessly the famed ambiguities of the film, and the unconscious resort of Buñuel to the Unconscious is certainly one way to set up the terms of the debate. Indeed it would explain everything about Buñuel from Un Chien Andalou to Viridiana (1961), wouldn't it? But Buñuel as a filmmaker also hooks us because he almost always tells a rattling good yarn.

Leaving aside debates about the incidental horror, say, of the 'infamous' eyeball slitting of Un Chien Andalou his films actually tell stories of stark simplicity and create almost perfect internal worlds, but the narrative lines are stark, often generic and easy to follow even when at their most sly or, as with Severine (Christine Deneuve) and the 'bee in the box' in Belle de Jour, ultimately too much fun to really need to be explained in mundane terms. (A bee? A battery driven micro-dildo? Who cares.)

The stories are also most often tragic at the core if blackly comic in execution: games of lust, art and machine gun politique in a stately home (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) for example and, always, the interlacing of powerful sexual themes as the motor for action. After all, let's not forget Belle de Jour's plot (based on Joseph Kessel's play) is about a woman, Severine, a classic haute bourgeoisie in both looks and background detail, who spends the afternoons in a Paris brothel, on the job. Phew, what a scorcher.

It can get hot in Buñuel's cinema universe at times. Indeed, watching an elegant late Buñuel movie (shot by Sascha Vierny, as Belle de Jour was) is a bit like conducting a (classy) affair in the Paris Musée de la Mode et du Textile by night. How is it that such a contrary fellow had so quickly and permanently ensnared a worldwide following bordering on cultish from his first film – not unlike Salvador Dali, but without the silly Hispanic carry-on? [...]

But Wood is at his best – and the monograph at its most useful – when the writing is loose and more speculative rather than concerned with the technicalities of shot description. Dealing with the ending of the film he writes: “The other image is far from graceful or quiet. It is so crass that it looks like and must in part be, one of Buñuel's jokes about the very idea of intelligible meaning.” (66)

When less certain Wood is more helpful – Buñuel's work cannot be reduced to a Bordwell and Thomson shot listing. But this book – and the BFI series in general – are better when going with the movies rather than cutting them up. So that as Wood himself has suggested, it is possible to say something about the unspeakable gap between the Novel and the Film when you relax a bit: In a novel, you can simply say it didn't happen. I was dreaming all this, and there are no real consequences. I

n a film, you can say 'I was dreaming all this' but it's not clear what you've done when you say it. [...] And Luis Buñuel –one of our most fascinating image-makers of the last century – and this book ensures that the postmodern set, the new generation of highly visually literate readers, will continue to take as much interest in him as the movie punters.

from Jonathan Dawson, January 2002


References Aranda, Francisco, Luis Buñuel, trans. and ed. by D. Robinson, Da Capo Press, New York, 1976 Durgnat, Raymond, Luis Buñuel, Studio Vista, London, 1982 Kessel, Joseph, Belle de Jour, Gallimard, Paris, 1928 King, Noel, An Interview with Michael Wood at Princeton University, 25 October 2000 Forthcoming Metro Magazine. Interview extracts reproduced with kind permission of Noel King.

 

[catalina_francisco]

Hmm, have to find time to dig mine out if possible..is not about the movie but the actual story and is definately not this one all over the web listed as confessions of a London call girl.

Catalinahttp://www.smilies4you.de/content/sonstige/c82.gif

 

[Pure]

Hi Catalina,
Sounds like you may have a copy of Kessler's novel, probably in French.

{{Revision: The novel Catalina has could well be in English; I think it exists, see amazon.com ref., this thread.}}

 

[catalina_francisco]

Hi Catalina,
Sounds like you may have a copy of Kessler's novel, probably in French.

Translated into english perhaps...can't read French.

Catalina

 

[Pure]

Yes, Cat, I do find this reference, though I can't be absolutely sure it's English.

For Mr. Blonde, see Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...34/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/002-0950624-5492850

Belle De Jour
by Joseph Kessel




Availability: Usually ships within 1-2 business days.



9 used & new from $5.00

Edition: Paperback


Other Editions: List Price: Our Price: Other Offers:

Paperback $16.95 $16.95 Order it used!

 

[catalina_francisco]

Yes, Cat, I do find this reference, though I can't be absolutely sure it's English.

If I'm not mistaken, my copy has a pic on the front in golden tones of a woman sitting draped on a bed through diffusion filter.

Catalina

 

[AngelicAssassin]

Ok ...

http://print.google.com/print/doc?articleid=sLlpj7IyDz5

From the above link, it appears Miramax re-released the original sometime in the 94-96 timeframe.

and here's the link

http://www.family-movie-review.com/...ntury/Giraudoux,_Jean/Giraudoux,_Jean_43.html

for the DVD release.

 

[Pure]

Yes, I believe I remember that, angelic. A re-release of a classic.
Seen it?

Note to Catalina,

If I'm not mistaken, my copy has a pic on the front in golden tones of a woman sitting draped on a bed through diffusion filter.

Unfortunately, Wood's study, also has that or a similar picture on the cover. I'd advise a purchaser (wanting the novel) to make sure the author is Kessel.

I don't know if you're aware of this, Catalina, but in the US, often a cooked-up 'novel' appears *after* a movie, based on the screenplay, there having been no novel prior to the screenplay. Usually it's of mediocre quality, and simply tries to capitalize on the interest in the movie.

 

[AngelicAssassin]

Yes, I believe I remember that, angelic. A re-release of a classic.
Seen it?

i'm trying to remember 94/95 while in Europe. Believe it, or not, i may have seen this on a military base.

 

[Pure]

SM heartland, in other words.

((Ever see that American melodrama, with occasional redeeming moments--'The General's Daughter' 1999))

 

[AngelicAssassin]

SM heartland, in other words.

Only if you're speaking of the masochist side. You had to be to serve under Slick Willie for eight years. (and no ... don't go there in this thread *laughing* we're talking high French Art)

((Ever see that American melodrama, with occasional redeeming moments--'The General's Daughter' 1999))

Yep, which did you think redeeming?

 

[Pure]

Occasional moment of her suffering, esp. when she's lying in hospital and dad visits and it becomes clear to her he's wanting her to drop the matter. While the 'acting out' is overstated, and in some ways, trite--getting fucked a lot-- it does make sense. Too bad a subtler screenwriter and director weren't involved in perfecting a better, less obviously florid, realization of the basic story. (And of course, it's one of those mysteries with just a few too many, almost manufactured 'twists.')

 

[Mr Blonde]

If the copy Catalina has is about ten year's old, it might be this book:

Belle Du Jour
Joseph Kessel
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 207036125X
Pub. Date: November 1995
Publisher: Gallimard, Editions

I saw two used copies on sale through the internet.


The DVD had been on my "to see" list for years and I had never found it anywhere. I recently started visiting a library and half of my old "to see" list is in their DVD collection so I am just working my way through. A bunch of obscure foreign films like "Les Quatre cents coups (1959)" and so forth.

 

[catalina_francisco]

Finally remembered I had most of my books catalogued on my computer so this is the one I have in English.....Kessel, Joseph., (1962) Belle De Jour London Uk Pan Books

Catalina