Healthy glow in the tum

by Michael Heath

One autumnally rich day, drenched in gold and amber and rustic (healthily enhanced by a smattering of toy train whistle, and gentle pastorallic cow bells) an openaired landau driven by two sinister blackbirds, and containing an honest looking married couple, comes driving into the lens of the camera. Credits flit by, the effect is glowing in the turn already. The landau stops, the girl is dragged screaming to a tree in the forest, the blackbirds rolls up their sleeves and on a nod from the husband, the now half naked wife is roped to the tree and whipped -all rather like a Ross Hunter/Nemec beget-together. But this is the great Luis Bunuel, now aged 68, an acknowledged alcoholic, half blind, and his latest film, Belle de Jour (N.Z.F.S.). Such a tidy sophisticated trollic, and expensive joke, I assume, and a film so honestly moving in its lamentably poignant adagio-mood, I didn't know if. I was e e cumming or Geering. What I do know is that it is based on a novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel, and modified severely from same, so we can leave that alone for a start.

It is all very well to say that this great master of the surrealist cinema has been working for years in hidden undertones and symbols, and in this film, achieves such an "archectonic whole", it is his finest and most mature work. How the hell would I know. All very humm haa, and furtively snoring off during Rebellion of the Hanged, which at least had thumb screwing, which on paper sounds (at least) ridiculous. Eric Rhode says in the BBC Listener "Someone coming to Luis Bunuel's work for the first time would be disconcerted by Belle de Jour: not by its clearly told story, but Bunuel s seemingly noncommittal attitude to its subject." Too true.

Of course you'll wonder what the hell it is anyway, and most of you won't be seeing it at all, but to please myself, and give it a fair hearing (wheelchairs are definitely in), it is worth nothing (for those addicts of Salient file treasuries) the history of Bunuel in this place. This university's Film Society, in the days of Cousin, White and Eveready, imported Un Chien Andalou, and it received a few breasty teste cuts from our Walter Gnashers. The film flude back on its own!

Scraping the daunty lamentex of divisional-harms hearty artists, came news that The Young One, (1960) was available here, and it had a small run at the Princess. In english and shorter than Mort de, it was a necessary metaphorical nursery curse on an animalistic atoll.

Someone spoke up that The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) was helped here by the bogus exotics in the Fedup of Orations Sillyastes. And no one remembers that one. Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre (1963, with Moreau) was the best banned in the land-slobbery and gum horror. Hot cross Bunuel.

Getting back to Belle de Jour (which I do when side tracked by the artist's Histoire d'ough rave by me). The story is of Severine (Catherine Deneuve, beauty beyond dull care) who is married to Pierre (Jean Sorel), and is tormented by "masochistic fantasies." She applies at a superb brothel, run by Madame Anais-of the Dido and -ilk (Genevieve Page, who was Montand's wife in Grand Prix-a performance of alarming control and vivisectional beauty). A young cruel thug Marcel (Pierre Clementi) falls in love with Severine (her fleeting part-time activity earns her the name of Belle de Jour) and eventually shoots her husband. She nurses the speechless, wheelchair-ridden Pierre and the sound of cow bells etc, causes him to rise from the chair and say, "Let's take a vacation, go to the mountains."

Severine looks out the window, "do you hear?" and we see the landau once more moving towards us in the autumn light. The camera barely moves for a minute on the leaves of the ground. The film ends.

It is really a film strewn with gags and auto-suggestive foe-paths; Bunuel, at the expense of his horrified critics (in Paris on first release last year, it caused an unprecedented amount of spontaneous bitching and increduity) has pitched in all his loving care and tendres of mood, to allow an open interpretation of reality and unreality-unfortunately helping us in the roman and italic alternating subtitles, but occasionally even they were a stenchless form of herring-rouge.

The film has been auto-censored. Cuts were made before the producers submitted it to the French censors. Severine is picked up at an alfresco cafe (we see Bunuel and a little Hakim nogging at a table!) by a puffy Hammer-looking Duke and in the same landau (driven by the same blackbirds), they encage in a ritual at a castle. She is dressed in a synthetic black negligee and is covered in asphodels, lying in a coffin. The Duke descends under it, and the coffin rocks. Severine stares horrified. (Snip snip.)

At the ski resort (establishing-shots run gammy here) with friends (Macha Meril, looking divine) she and Michel Piccoli disappear under a table with a broken bottle. Table rocks, snip snip.

Bunuel says the film is a pornographic film, by which he means chaste eroticism. It is so very chaste and unbiasedly sexless,"yet erotic, and the effect pornographic." (John Simon would like that for his annals!)

There are all the references one needs to note its healthy chaste bourgeois atmosphere. The clients at the brothel are all old and peculiarly endowed, by which I mean there is a professor who calls for an ink bottle, a gynaecologist with his little de Sade-inspired whipping playlet, the tundrous Japanese gentleman who tries to pay with a geisha diners card (he has a black box that buzzes!) and Marcel in his black leather coat and tin teeth.

There is no feeling in it, no quantity of despair or hate for anyone, yet they are each controlled, and their mannerisms and pity, if any, are kept buried inside them. We never get to know anything about Severine. But the film seems to linger. Burnt ochres and the pastel rooms (the photography of Sacha Vierny-Resnais uses him consistently-seems to catch all colours in mid-flight), the superb clothing, noises of feet, cowbells, sleigh bells, mewwings. There is no music. It is damnably funny at times; giggly brittle tones of sadly moving people, in and out of puppetry, synthesised "dirty business' in the streets of Paris.

But little informs us, or reminds us that this is the great Luis Bunuel who we are watching. What we have read of him, and there is such a lot of good criticism still to be found, does not tie in with any of this film. Bunuel during the filming in Paris said of this film: "No more cinema for me-not in Spain. Not in France. Nowhere. Belle de Jour is my last film."

Un- or fortunately, it seems this is not so. For out of a few months reclusing, it has been publicly made known that he has finished another script with Jean-Claude Cassiere (who did Belle) for his next film, provisionally titled "La Voie Lactee" ("The Milky Way").

Maybe one day we will wait for the old man to do what he had planned several years ago-a film of Dalton Trumbo's moving novel Johnny Got His Gun. Two people I know would give both their arms and legs to see this come true.