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:. I was dreaming all this, and there are no real consequences. The same is true, endlessly, within The Discreet Charm.
In the end we are left with the movie itself, still as elusive and confronting as ever. Click here to order this book directly from. Interview extracts reproduced with kind permission of Noel King. Home Book Reviews. Issue I was very unhappy. Belle de jour certainly falls into that category, and also, typically, skewers the entitled classes. Sporting the chicest Yves Saint Laurent finery, Deneuve revels in the peculiar desires of her character while always inviting our own.
The director had some modifying to do as well. I was also able to indulge myself in the faithful description of some interesting sexual perversions. What's in the box? The literal truth doesn't matter. The symbolic truth, which is all Bunuel cares about, is that it contains something of great erotic importance to the client. Into Madame Anais' come two gangsters. One of them, young and swaggering, with a sword-stick, a black leather cape and a mouthful of hideous steel teeth, is Marcel Pierre Clementi.
She is turned on by his insults, his manner, and no doubt by her mental image of her cool perfection being defiled by his crude street manners. They have an affair, which leads up to the deep irony of the final melodramatic scenes--but what Marcel never understands is that while Severine is addicted to what he represents, she hardly cares about him at all. He is a prop for her fantasy life, the best one she has ever found. Bunuel , one of the greatest of all directors, was almost contemptuous of stylistic polish.
A surrealist as a young man, a collaborator with Salvador Dali on the famous " Un Chien Andalou " , he was deeply cynical about human nature, but with amusement, not scorn. He was fascinated by the way in which deep emotional programming may be more important than free will in leading us to our decisions. Many of his films involve situations in which the characters seem free to act, but are not. He believed that many people are hard-wired at an early age into lifelong sexual patterns.
Severine is such a person. She knows she has betrayed Pierre. For that matter, she knows she has used Marcel shamefully, even though that's what he thought he was doing to her. In the words of Woody Allen , which contain as much despair as defiance, the heart wants what the heart wants. The film is elegantly mounted -- costumes, settings, decor, hair, clothes--and languorous in its pacing. Severine's fate seems predestined. In one, her husband Jean Sorel drives her in a horsedrawn carriage through an autumnal wood.
There he ties her to a tree and flogs her, and hands her over to the coachmen to be raped. In another, the husband and Husson tie her up in a field of cows and pelt her with manure. Each dream contains a passing reference to cats — but the animals themselves are never seen.
Here she must impersonate his dead daughter, while he masturbates discreetly beneath the coffin. Allegedly, the producers trimmed this sequence even before submitting it to the French censor.
Its imagery and its ambience seem to be drawn, overwhelmingly, from the dreams that precede it. If Belle de jour is in fact two films, then the coffin episode is two scenes and possibly more. As Michael Wood writes:. I might even go further and say, the more richly and tantalisingly confused you get, the more fully you have understood Belle de jour.
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