BELLE DE JOUR
A film review by Rian Schmidt
Copyright 1995 Rian Schmidt
I have just returned from my fifth viewing of BELLE DE JOUR, and I am all at once repulsed and disoriented. My arousal is only outweighed by my melancholy which is, in turn, in a tumultuous yet jejune dialectic with my own Oedipal introspection.
Allow me to digress. Bunuel's image of a Venusian bourgeoise masochistic monolith in Deneuve moved me in violent vacillation from horror to flatulence and back again in a terrifying yet unceasingly vapid repetition of pseudo-Freudian references to cats and oceans and lost teeth that was nothing short of brilliant in its nauseating evocation of intellectual masturbation on a scale not seen since Tarkovsky. Even now, I feel woozy.
The then 66-year-old surrealist director's ambiguous juxtapositioning of morbidity and sexuality predated 9-1/2 WEEKS by many years and yet, astoundingly, exhibits the same directorial latent homosexuality as its filmatic offspring while maintaining a steady obfuscating flow of neo-intellectual symbolism which is evocative of collegial debate in which one participant has the teaching note, but alas the viewer not only lacks the appropriate preparation but is left feeling as though they might count themselves among the half of humanity arbitrarily burdened with an IQ less than 100.
Before the honored reader assumes that the preceding comments are the harbinger of a condemnation of this erotic classic, this humble critic must dispel such fallacious (ex post this feeble critic is self-congratulatory in his avoidance of the Freudian use of "fellatious" in this context) impressions by pronouncing his unqualified accolades for Bunuel's work.
This pinheaded, foul-smelling critic feels comfortable in his assertion that the exalted, nay holy, viewer shall experience the same elicitation of childhood incestuous desires for same sex siblings and parents as did this putrid, moronic, pedophilic, maniacal postal-employee reject of a film critic. In the end, it is Deneuve's experience as Severine that draws one under the metaphoric dinner table with a broken bottle and packet of seeds to write a letter to one's own sadistic carriage driver. "Dear Sir, You may release the cats now. I have no death for you today."
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