Life is nothing but a continuous, heartbreaking game of mirrors
that ends in confusion.
I am not surprised by the fact that there are no reviews of this film here and that writings on Bunuel are numerically lacking on this site.
This is because reviewing a Bunuel film is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. It would be like understanding all the secrets hidden behind a dream and finding a logic to it. Thus, even his most accessible film can be so complex and fascinating that it makes a Rubik's cube seem like a trivial toy. And it is precisely for this reason that I may fail in my attempt to explain what sensations this cinematic gem has inflicted on me. But just as Bunuel's films turn out to be impossible to describe, one finds oneself invaded by a libertine happiness after watching them. I still cannot understand this strange emotional phenomenon.
Yet, every time I watch a work by the Spanish director, it is as if my soul warms up and feels the need to talk about it to everyone. Absolutely everyone.
"Belle de Jour" (1967) could have turned out to be a half misstep. A disaster.
Because it is a commissioned film given to a director who always preferred to work in absolute freedom, and it is based on a poorly written French novel whose author's name now escapes me. Yet the resulting film is a masterpiece, and I thank that unfortunate writer, because without him, this splendid metaphysical charm would never have surfaced.
A film shot with a sublime hand, skillfully alternating fluid camera movements with long takes, and with an autumnal and fascinating photography that enlivens the falsely warm look of an appointment room that turns out to be the mind. Severine is the body.
Bunuel manages to exploit a daring idea from a 1960s pinku-eiga to transform it into one of his usual, beautiful, dreamlike misunderstandings, led by a suave, beautiful Catherine Deneuve. The film intercedes, and as it unfolds, it becomes increasingly ominous, because it is ever more beautiful, ever more alive.
It's as if his film takes life to shake our very souls and throw them into the fire of identity. And in the end, I no longer know who I am.
But when will we have a filmmaker so capable of making his cinema life itself in Europe?
Ps. in the Italian edition, some sequences indispensable to the story were inexplicably cut, including the notorious flashback in which Severine refuses communion. The Golden Lion at Venice was well-deserved.
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