Movie Review: Belle De Jour

Directed by: Luis Buñuel 

Starring: Catherine Deneuve

Jean Sorel

Michel Piccoli

Geneviève Page

Pierre Clémenti  

Released: 1967

Running time: 101 minutes

 

 

“Belle de Jour” has been hailed as an erotic classic by many film critics the world over. This 1967 French foreign film (viewed with English subtitles) tells the story of a beautiful young woman named Severine, who is married to a handsome doctor. She loves her husband dearly but she denies him sex because she cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. Instead, she indulges in kinky and erotic fantasies within her mind and her dreams in order to fulfill her sexual desires. To Severine, vanilla sex with her husband just doesn’t do it for her.  

Yet, it is Severine’s purity and sophistication that men, such as her husband, find to be attractive. She gives off the external persona of a woman who is wholesome, traditional and prudish. However, she possesses a sexuality that longs for untraditional and kinky sexual experiences, in particular sex that involves fetishes and D&S where she is submissive.

 

 

 

The name Severine is the female version of the male name Severin, the male masochist in the book “Venus in Furs”. Like Severin in “Venus in Furs”, Severine is a masochist, although only within her fantasies. “Belle de Jour” opens with a fantasy sequence where Severine is riding in a horse drawn carriage with her husband and they stop in the middle of nowhere and her husband has the two coachmen drag Severine forcefully out of the carriage and they tie her to a tree and whip her with the buggy whips.

Then the one coachman has his way with her sexually while her husband watches. Severine wakes up from her fantasy dream and returns to her normal, vanilla life of being a housewife to a doctor.
 

In real life, Severine and her husband, Pierre, sleep in separate beds because she cannot bring herself to be intimate with him. He is understanding and believes she is just a “good girl” who needs time to become comfortable with him before she can engage in sex. Being the wife of a doctor, Severine lives the good life. They are members of the county club, they live in a nice home and she wears expensive clothing.
 

Severine is obviously bored and when she hears the gossip that one of the women at the country club lives a double life by working at a “whorehouse”, she becomes obsessed with the thrill of what it must be like to live such a double life.  
 

Severine asks questions and in her search for information, Severine learns of exclusive Paris brothels where housewives sometimes work in the afternoons, making extra money while their husbands are at the office. Henri, a friend of Pierre, is a sex-crazed male who desires Severine and who frequents Paris brothels. When he hears Severine asking questions about whorehouses, he gives her the address of an exclusive brothel ran by a business woman by the name of Madame Anais. Severine is now overcome with the temptation to visit Madame Anais’ brothel.
 

 

Watching Severine’s obsession and temptation with secret double lives and the sexual world of brothels reminded me of some of the men I have talked with about their journey into the world of female domination, and to a lesser extent my own personal journey. When a submissive male first learns about the Dominatrix, he becomes curious and fascinated, perhaps to the place that it consumes his thoughts and dominates his fantasies. He wonders what it would be like to visit such a place, to actually session with a Dominatrix.  
 

One of my phone clients told me how he would frequent Adult bookstores hoping to find the latest issue of “DDI” (Dominant Directory International), then he would obsess over the ads of the leather clad Mistresses with whips for weeks, finally gaining the nerve to contact a professional Dominatrix. He eventually made an appointment, gained the address, and drove past her place multiple times prior to the day of his actual appointment, struggling with the internal battle over whether or not to follow-through with the appointment, only to find that the desire to be dominated was too strong to resist.  
 

Any male who has had that kind of experience can relate to Severine as she locates the address of Madame Anais’ brothel. She walks up to the front door, only to walk away. Then the next time she goes into the building and locates the apartment number, only to again lose her nerve. Then finally, she gains the nerve to ring the buzzer and introduces herself to Madame Anais. Once she takes that step, she finds herself living the double life she has been fantasizing about.  
 

Madame Anais gives her the pseudo name, Belle de Jour, meaning 'Beauty of the Day', since Severine can only work between the hours of 2pm and 5pm because she must be home before her husband returns. Severine works with two other women, Charlotte and Renee.

 

 

Most of Severine’s fantasies revolve around her being submissive. She likes it when a client handles her a little rough. The brothel allows some of her fantasies to become reality. Nevertheless, she also discovers that fantasies are at times best when they only exist in the arena of the mind. For example, she has the fantasy of wanting to be bound and whipped. However, when a young, male client, Marcel (who is a gangster) becomes too attached to Belle de Jour, he gets angry when she is away for a couple of weeks while on vacation with her husband. When she returns to the brothel, Marcel comes by and he attempts to beat her with his belt. After only one strike, Severine stands up to him and forbids him to ever hit her again. Marcel backs down. Severine realizes that she in fact does not want to be whipped by a man. She loves the fantasy but not the reality.  
 

Severine is indeed a strong woman, even though she has masochistic fantasies. She totally controls her husband, denying him sex while she has sexual flings in the afternoon at the brothel. Her husband is handsome, successful and intelligent but he is weak when compared to Severine.

 

 

The tragic and near fatal ending for Pierre is the result of Severine’s secret life. Marcel shoots him in a jealous rage and Pierre is confined to a wheelchair, relying on Severine to take care of him. That is the moral warning of the film, that one's actions can negatively affect not only your life, but also the life of those you love the most. That is an important message and not exclusive to the women who work at brothels. The man who frequents a brothel is also putting his wife at risk if he were to contract a disease.  
 

The one FemDom scene in the movie involves a male client, a professor, who wants to role-play that he is the servant to a dominant woman. Severine fails to understand what he wants so Madame Anais has her watch through a peep hole as Charlotte fulfills the professor’s fantasy by humiliating him about not keeping a clean enough house, trampling him with her shoes and whipping him. Charlotte makes the comment to Severine that she wishes all clients were like the professor, implying that she enjoys being in the dominant role.
 

 

It has been said that Director Luis Bunuel had a fetish for women’s shoes and feet, often showing close-ups of women in high heel shoes. Perhaps the scene where Charlotte is dominating the professor was Bunuel’s way of expressing his own fetish within “Belle de Jour”.  
 

As a dominant woman, I could not relate to Severine’s submissive fantasies, but I could relate to her desire to live a double life. Having been the Head Mistress of a ClubFEM group and being active in the FemDom lifestyle within my own marriage, I kind of live a double life. I am fortunate that my husband is a part of my double life but my family and friends have no idea about my female domination lifestyle and I still have fantasies that I have not even shared with my husband. He may one day be the object of some of those fantasies, but then again, maybe not. Just like Severine, many of my fantasies do not involve my husband.  
 

I have never worked at a brothel, nor would I, but I have experienced the thrill of being a professional Dominatrix on a few occasions. It is exciting to live a secret life, a life the people who know you the best would never guess in a million years. The key to a secret life is that you don't venture too far into the deep that you cannot safely return to the secure ground of your regular life.  
 

“Belle de Jour” is not about female domination per se, but it is about fetishes, secret desires, and the sexual fantasies of wives.
 

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars