Belle de Jour (1967): Buñuel’s Housewife, Afternoon Brothel, and SM Fantasies

For kink viewers, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour is not a how-to of negotiated SM. It is a cold, dream-logic psychological drama about a bourgeois housewife who works weekday afternoons in a high-class brothel while her husband is at the office. Catherine Deneuve plays Séverine. What she actually wants — domination, sadomasochism, bondage fantasy — only gets a body in the daylight house. Everywhere else it stays inside her head.

The title puns on belle de nuit — beauty of the night, slang for a prostitute — because Séverine works in daylight under the alias Belle de Jour. The same phrase is also the French name for the morning glory, a flower that opens only by day. Séverine loves her husband, Dr. Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel), and still cannot share physical intimacy with him. Her sexual life is locked in elaborate fantasies. A childhood memory of an inappropriate adult touch sits under that lock, along with the clean pressure of being a doctor’s wife.

On a ski trip they meet predatory friend Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli). Back in Paris Séverine learns from a friend that a mutual acquaintance now works in a brothel. Roses from Husson unsettle her; at the tennis courts he names a high-class house at 11 Cité Jean de Saumur. She goes. Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page) names her Belle de Jour and puts her on a two-to-five clock. At first she is reluctant; she answers the madam’s firm hand and has sex with a stranger. After a week away she returns to the same hours, then goes home to a husband who does not know.

Fantasy and the afternoons cross. She fantasizes about Husson in Pierre’s presence; her physical life with Pierre improves. Young criminal Marcel supplies the voltage her daydreams asked for. Husson visits the brothel, finds her, agrees not to tell Pierre, and rejects her services because he is no longer attracted. She leaves with Madame Anaïs’s blessing. An associate follows her home. Marcel appears, threatens exposure, waits downstairs, shoots Pierre three times, flees, and is shot dead by police. Pierre survives in a coma, then lives paralyzed and blind in a wheelchair. Husson comes to tell him the truth; she does not stop him. After he leaves she finds Pierre crying. In an ending that may be another fantasy, Pierre rises from the chair, pours a drink, and talks holiday plans. Buñuel will not say whether that last shot is cure, denial, or another scene in her head.

Robert and Raymond Hakim offered Buñuel Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel — a book he called a bit of a soap opera — and he took it to turn something he disliked into something he did. He and Jean-Claude Carrière interviewed women in Madrid brothels about their sexual fantasies. He was unhappy with twenty-two-year-old Deneuve in the lead; she later said they showed more of her than promised and that she felt totally used, while he mocked her prudery on set. Principal photography ran from 10 October to 12 December 1966. Much of her wardrobe was Yves Saint Laurent and Roger Vivier. Locations included the Champs-Élysées and the Chalet de la Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne.

For BDSM viewers the usable core is Séverine’s inner cinema. The brothel is a workplace with hours; the fantasies are the actual kink content. She can be named, scheduled, and handled by a madam, then pulled toward a criminal who matches the violence of the daydreams. That respectable-woman-with-a-paid-daytime-erotic-life setup later stuck as a nickname for Brooke Magnanti’s Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. The interesting part is how the fantasy architecture gets a body, not the money.

Belle de Jour was Deneuve’s second major triumph after The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and won the Golden Lion at Venice. Watch it for the afternoon alias, the madam’s hand, the roses that feel like a threat, and the last shot that will not tell you whether Pierre can walk.