The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luis Buñuel · a film in French · 1967 · about 100 minutes · written with Jean-Claude Carrière from the novel by Joseph Kessel · produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim · photographed by Sacha Vierny · a French and Italian production
Mode
Psychological drama of a double life, surrealist in method; case history, erotic film and bourgeois satire held in one deadpan manner
Mythos
Wife and whore lived as one woman by alternation; the sleeping or dead bride laid out in a wood and in a coffin; the host refused; the maimed husband who rises
Phase
From a landau in an autumn park to the same landau passing empty, by way of a ski resort, a run of afternoons at the house and a shooting in the street
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 100 minutes, French dialogue; no musical score; a star at its centre, clothes by Yves Saint Laurent; fantasies cut in without dissolve, filter or music
Register
Cool and deadpan throughout; from a sweet manufacturer’s farce to a rite over a coffin, a whipping and a breakfast given the same lens
Scale
One marriage, one house of assignation, its clients from a sweet manufacturer to a duke, the underworld at its door
Governing Proposition
A young wife who loves her husband and cannot desire him spends her afternoons at a house of assignation under the name Belle de Jour, and comes home in the evening to their twin beds, until a young criminal from the house carries the double life into the flat. The wager of the film is that respectability and degradation are one order and its underside, kept apart by the bourgeois marriage, and that a film which shows fantasy and act in one register, with no mark between them, can leave the viewer as unable to sort them as she is.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Under the credits a landau comes along an avenue of an autumn park, its horses’ bells sounding, a husband and wife inside. In the wood she is whipped. Then the film cuts to a bedroom: the Serizys at home, in twin beds. Nothing has told the viewer that the wood was a fantasy. There was no dissolve, no filter, no music; the prologue was lit like the bedroom and framed by the same level camera. Before the viewer knows which grammar is in force, the film has given its first fantasy in the grammar of fact, and every scene after it carries the doubt.
Luis Buñuel made the film in 1967, a French and Italian production, from a screenplay he wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière after Joseph Kessel’s novel of 1928. Robert and Raymond Hakim produced it; Sacha Vierny photographed it in colour; Yves Saint Laurent dressed its star. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy and Jean Sorel her husband Pierre, with Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clémenti and Francisco Rabal. It is in French, runs about 100 minutes, and won the Golden Lion at Venice. Buñuel was sixty-seven and in exile, six years after Viridiana; Deneuve came to it from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Repulsion; the producers wanted a commercial erotic film.
Three inheritances meet in it: Kessel’s psychological novel, the French commercial cinema of stars and quality, and the surrealism Buñuel had brought to film in Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or. He turned all three. The fantasies are cut in without any sign, so that no scene is guaranteed; an erotic film is made nearly without nudity, by suggestion, sound and objects; and the end will be left undecidable. The turn was taken on a path he had proven. The unmarked dream had served him in Los olvidados and Viridiana, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad had made the indeterminacy of the real a complete form six years before.
Movement II
Séverine loves Pierre with tenderness and cannot desire him. At a ski resort his friend Henri Husson, played by Piccoli, watches her with amused attention, and talk of brothels enters the film. Husson is the one person in it who sees her. Back in Paris she goes to the house of Madame Anaïs, played by Page: the hesitation on the stairs, the name she is given, Belle de Jour, and the money. She will work there in the afternoons and be home by evening, a wife by night and a prostitute by day.
That alternation is the film’s architecture, and it is the oldest split in the imagining of women, wife and whore, not named but lived by one woman on one timetable. The title turns the belle de nuit, the woman of the night, into a woman of the day. Under it lies a second, lighter pattern, the sleeping beauty in the wood, since the prologue’s wood lays her out as a bride asleep or dead. Two flashbacks to her childhood, a workman’s touch and the host refused her at her first communion, set the Church’s mark under her fantasy.
The flashbacks offer a cause, and the film withholds the claim that they explain. That refusal is the shape of the whole: the condition is shown and not diagnosed. Séverine’s interior stays opaque by design, so her desire is disclosed in its shape more than entered, and the frame is partly a man’s view of a woman’s desire. Around the built centre much is carried by Catholic image and allusion, which summons the sacred more than it builds it. But the alternation itself bears weight scene by scene, and Deneuve plays it in stillness, a performance of withholding that gives nothing away at the house or at home.
Movement III
Then come the clients. Monsieur Adolphe, a sweet manufacturer, is farcical with his money and his appetite. An Asian client brings a small lacquered box that hums; the maid refuses him, Séverine accepts, and the lid is never lifted for the viewer. A professor plays a punished servant in a game Séverine watches through a spyhole. The respectable are the house’s clients, each in a rite of his own, and the house is the underside of the order they keep in the street.
The sound is the film’s most exact instrument. There is no score. The landau has its bells, the fantasies have the mewing of cats, the box has its hum. Buñuel’s direction is plain and economical, the camera at eye level and rarely moving for show, and Vierny keeps the colour cool and soft, the flat and the house lit alike. That evenness is what makes the unmarked fantasy possible: since nothing is lit or framed for a dream, nothing can be ruled out of one. The box carries the same law as an object, and the viewer’s curiosity about it is made a client’s.
What is in the box is the question Buñuel answered by refusing it, and the question has lasted, with the others the film keeps open: which scenes are fantasy, whether everything after some point is dreamt, what the ending is. Some of that return is to a puzzle, which invites more than it deepens, and the box has become an emblem more than a depth. The catalogue of clients has its own cost. Each widens the range of desire and each is a set piece, but one of them, perhaps two, could go without loss to the argument, and some of the comedy at the house is broad.
Movement IV
A Duke takes Séverine to his house. She lies in a coffin under a veil, and he conducts a rite over her. The film does not mark the episode as real or as dreamt. Elsewhere, with as little warning, mud is thrown at her white dress, and a duel is fought. These fantasies are given in the same light, at the same distance and at the same pace as a breakfast, and they are the film’s heights, of a dry, uncanny kind: the coffin and the veil, the mud on the white dress, the whips in the wood, the box that hums.
Here the form shows what it knows. Desire does not keep the line between the imagined and the done, and the unmarked cut is that knowledge: the viewer, like Séverine, cannot sort the fantasy from the act. Mark the dreams with dissolves and a harp and the film would become a case history, with a patient and a cure. The flat style, which gives a whipping and a breakfast the same lens, is the bourgeois surface the desire runs beneath, and one physics holds from the sweet manufacturer’s farce to the gravity of the rite: dream and act weigh the same.
The disclosure the film makes can be stated and holds. A woman may find her pleasure in a debasement she chooses and governs; respectability and degradation are one order and its underside; and the bourgeois marriage is the house that keeps them apart. The professor, the Duke and Husson, who desires her only while she is out of reach, are the respectable men as the deeper perverts, and Séverine sets the terms. The heights are rationed by method, and long stretches, the ski resort, the salon of the house, the street, are level and comic. The film is great without being elevated.
Movement V
Marcel, a young criminal played by Clémenti, with steel teeth and a swordstick, all appetite, comes to the house with Hippolyte, played by Rabal. Husson finds her there. Marcel follows her into her own life, comes to the flat and shoots Pierre in the street, and is killed by the police. Only a man from outside the bourgeois contract could carry the double life into the flat and break it. But the gangster plot is told in the inherited grammar of genre, the follow, the gun, the police; its pace breaks from the film’s measured law, and the shooting and Marcel’s death are dispatched and staged perfunctorily rather than built.
Pierre is left paralysed and blind, in a wheelchair. Sorel’s Pierre has been a blank throughout, as the role wants, and the film does not fill the blank. Husson visits to tell him the truth, off screen, and a tear runs down Pierre’s face. Then Pierre rises from the chair, the landau’s bells are heard, and the empty landau passes by. The realist plot’s catastrophe is dissolved by the prologue’s bells, and the ending cannot be assigned to fact or to fantasy. The orders the film holds are marriage and sexuality, class, the Church, medicine and labour, all through Séverine; the state appears only as the police, history is absent from its Paris, and every mind but hers is surface.
Fifty-nine years on, the film survives whole, in the one cut, reissued in a restoration in 1995, on home video, in repertory and in teaching, and its star’s image, in Saint Laurent’s clothes, has passed into common reference beyond its audience. It was Buñuel’s largest commercial success and opened his late French period. Beside his other films on this desk it stands level with The Exterminating Angel at 8.3, below The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at 8.6 and Viridiana at 8.5, and above That Obscure Object of Desire at 8.0 and The Phantom of Liberty at 7.7. It is the one that put the unmarked dream inside a star’s melodrama and left the viewer, at the end, with an empty carriage and the sound of bells.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, most of the film is required. The prologue gives the first fantasy in the film’s realist grammar before the viewer knows which grammar is in force, so every later scene carries the doubt. The ski resort is needed for Husson, the one person who sees her. The childhood flashbacks are needed and kept insufficient: they offer a cause and the film withholds the claim that they explain. Marcel, from outside the bourgeois contract, is needed to carry the double life into the flat and break it, and the prologue’s bells require the ending. The give is in the run of clients, where one episode, perhaps two, could go without loss to the argument, and in the last stretch, where the shooting and Marcel’s death are dispatched rather than built.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a woman may love her husband with tenderness and be unable to desire him, and find her pleasure in a debasement she chooses and governs; respectability and degradation are one order and its underside, and the bourgeois marriage is the house that keeps them apart. The film shows it without diagnosis. The professor who plays a punished servant, the Duke at his mock rite, Husson who desires her only while she is out of reach: the respectable are the house’s clients. A second truth is given in image, that from inside fantasy and act cannot be separated. What holds the axis at the bar: Séverine’s interior stays opaque, so the condition is disclosed in its shape more than entered, and the frame is partly a man’s view of a woman’s desire.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The register is cool and deadpan, and Buñuel refuses lift: no score, a level camera, the scandalous played at the pace of the ordinary. When elevation comes it comes as strangeness, dry and uncanny. The landau in the autumn park and the whips in the wood; Séverine laid in a coffin under a veil while the Duke conducts his rite; mud thrown at her white dress; a small lacquered box that hums and is never opened to the viewer; Deneuve’s face held still, giving nothing; the empty landau passing under the bells. These heights recur, but the method rations them, and long stretches, the ski resort, the salon of the house and the street plot, are level and comic. Frequency holds the axis here: the film is great without being elevated.
Score: 8.0 / 10
At its centre the myth is built. The oldest split in the imagining of women, wife and whore, is not named but lived: Séverine is a chaste wife by night and a prostitute by afternoon, and the film’s architecture is that alternation. The title turns the woman of the night, the belle de nuit, into a woman of the day. The sacred and its profanation are set into the frame, in the refused host and the Duke’s rite over a veiled body. Around that centre more is evoked than built. The sleeping beauty in the wood is a lighter pattern; much of the archetype is carried by Catholic image and allusion; and the gangster plot of the second half is genre matter that the myth rides rather than shapes. That holds the axis below the gate.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: Kessel’s psychological novel of 1928; the French commercial cinema of stars and quality, from which Deneuve came after Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Repulsion (1965); and Buñuel’s own surrealism, from Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or to Viridiana. The departures are real: fantasy cut in without dissolve, filter or music, so that no scene is guaranteed; an erotic film made nearly without nudity, by suggestion, sound and objects; an ending left undecidable. So was the stake: a star, producers who wanted a commercial erotic film, the censor, and a director of sixty-seven in exile. What holds the axis is the path. The unmarked dream was Buñuel’s proven practice, in Los olvidados and Viridiana, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) had already made the indeterminacy of the real a complete form.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. What it knows is that desire does not keep the line between the imagined and the done, and the unmarked cut is that knowledge: the viewer, like Séverine, cannot sort the fantasy from the act, and neither the Duke’s rite nor the closing scene can be assigned. Mark the dreams with dissolves and a harp and the film becomes a case history, with a patient and a cure. The flat, even style, which gives a whipping and a breakfast the same lens, is the bourgeois surface the desire runs beneath; the withheld box makes the viewer’s curiosity a client’s; the bells dissolve the plot’s catastrophe at the close. What holds the axis is the gangster plot, told in the inherited grammar and outside the form’s doubt until the end.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over fifty-nine years. The questions have stayed open and argued: which scenes are fantasy, whether everything after a given point is dreamt, what the ending is, and what is in the box, a question Buñuel answered by refusing it. The readings accumulate and disagree: a psychoanalytic case, a surrealist assault on the bourgeoisie, a Catholic fable of guilt and desire, and a feminist reading divided between a study of a woman’s autonomy in fantasy and a male fantasy about that autonomy. The form yields on return, in the rhymes of bells and wood, coffin and wheelchair, the twin beds and the bed at the house. What holds the axis: much of the return is to a puzzle, which solicits rather than deepens, and the box has become an emblem more than a depth.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Released in 1967, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force: the fullest statement of a cinema in which fantasy and reality share one register, carried into a star vehicle and a commercial success, and the demonstration that an erotic film could hold its subject by withholding it. Much of that force belongs to Buñuel’s earlier films and to Resnais, and it is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Golden Lion at Venice; Buñuel’s largest commercial success, which opened his late French period; Deneuve’s image and the Saint Laurent clothes passed into common visual reference; and the erotic art film of later decades took part of its standing from this example. How far later films borrowed the unexplained box is not settled. The reach is real, and the film moved its field less than the decade’s founding films moved theirs.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-nine years. The form survives whole: the film as released in 1967 is the one cut in circulation, the American release of 1968 and the restored reissue of 1995 carry the same film, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: a wide first release, the reissue’s wide circulation, home video, repertory and teaching, and Deneuve’s image held in common reference beyond the film’s audience. The surface most fixed to its moment, Saint Laurent’s clothes of 1967 and the décor, now reads as period and style rather than fashion, and the bourgeois Paris it shows has dated into the setting of a fable. Part of the presence rests on one image of its star rather than on the film’s standing.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium. Buñuel’s plain, economical direction, the camera at eye level and rarely moving for show, is load-bearing: its evenness makes the unmarked fantasy possible. Sacha Vierny keeps the colour cool and soft, the flat and the house lit alike. The sound is a precise instrument: no score, bells for the landau, cats for the fantasy, a hum for the box. Deneuve’s stillness is a performance of withholding; Geneviève Page’s madam is brisk and maternal, Michel Piccoli’s Husson amused and predatory, Pierre Clémenti’s Marcel, with steel teeth and a swordstick, all appetite. The costs weigh: Jean Sorel’s Pierre is a blank the role asks for and the film does not fill, the street shooting and the police kill are staged perfunctorily, and some of the comedy at the house is broad.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Monsieur Adolphe, the sweet manufacturer, farcical with his money and his appetite, and Pierre in his wheelchair, blind, while Husson tells him the truth off screen. One law governs both: desire runs beneath the bourgeois order and mocks it, and the order absorbs the cost without changing its surface. The clients’ farce, the gravity of the Duke’s rite, the violence of the fantasies and the calm of the twin beds are shot in one deadpan register and obey one physics, in which dream and act weigh the same. The range is wide, from comedy of manners to sacrilege and a shooting. The strain is in the last act, where the gangster plot leans on genre rules, the follow, the gun, the police, and its pace breaks from the film’s measured law.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 100 minutes holds. Consciousness, in a woman’s fantasy life, rendered from outside but at the film’s centre; marriage and sexuality, the main order; class, in the bourgeois flat, the clients of the house across rank from a sweet manufacturer to a duke, and the underworld of Marcel and Hippolyte; the Church, in the communion flashback and the profaned rite; medicine, in Pierre’s surgery and a professor’s game; labour, in prostitution kept to hours and paid. Séverine integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: the state appears only as the police; history is absent, with no war and no politics in a Paris of 1967; nature is a park and a snowfield; and every consciousness but hers is surface, Pierre’s above all.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Living Form at 8.7, then The Made and The Inner Law at 8.6. A film whole in its one cut and continuously present for fifty-nine years; a form in which the unmarked cut is the knowledge that fantasy and act cannot be sorted from inside; a plain, even making with an exact design of sound that carries that form; and one deadpan law from a sweet manufacturer’s farce to a rite over a coffin.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: marriage, class, the Church, medicine and labour are held through one woman, but the state is only the police, history and politics are absent, nature is a park and a snowfield, and every consciousness but hers is surface. Above it, The Sublime at 8.0, heights of a dry, uncanny kind rationed by the method, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, a force shared with Buñuel’s earlier films and with Resnais and a reach real but moderate.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Unconcealment meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate and by its aggregate, 8.3, in the band of Tier IV, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Belle de Jour as released in 1967, in colour, about 100 minutes, from the landau in the park under the credits to the empty landau passing at the close: directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière from Joseph Kessel’s novel of 1928, produced by Robert and Raymond Hakim, photographed by Sacha Vierny, with Catherine Deneuve’s clothes by Yves Saint Laurent. The film as released is the unit, and one cut circulates as the film: the American release of 1968 and the restored reissue of 1995 carry the same cut and bear on its survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The register of the French speech is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. No dialogue is quoted, since no line’s exact words could be held to the word; speech is given in substance. The order of the middle scenes at the house and the placing of the duel and the mud are not given. Details that could not be verified, among them the editor and the designer, the name under which the reissue of 1995 was presented, the standing of the film’s presence among Buñuel’s, how far later films borrowed the box, the release date within 1967, the exact running time, and the scene and shot counts, share of dialogue, budget and first-run gross, are not given.