Saw Belle Du Jour, directed by Luis Buñuel, a man who makes some strange films. This one opens with an attractive woman and her also attractive husband on a horse-drawn carriage. Sleigh-bells jingle as he asks her if everything's perfect. They are the picture of Barbie-doll bucolic love. Suddenly they begin arguing and the husband, in a fury, commands the coachmen to 'do what we agreed!' They leap down and drag her, struggling, into the woods where they horse-whip her. We close up on her face to find that she's actually kind of enjoying the whipping and then zoom out to find she's been in her bedroom the whole time.
This sets the ambiguous tone of the whole film. She slips into other fantasies with little warning throughout the film. On its surface, it is the story of a libidinous woman who slides into a very pleasant-looking life of prostitution (apparently out of sheer frustration with her squeaky-clean husband.) Eventually her double-life comes to a terrible climax, and an apparently happy ending is rendered deeply ambiguous by the deafening sound of sleigh-bells.
But has the whole thing been imaginary? It seems the stuff of fantasy for a suburban house-wife to join a brothel. Perhaps the ending is a double-fake and is the signifier of a return to reality? To be utterly pedantic about it, the entire film, as we know, is a fantasy. This woman does not exist: she is only an actor. This line of thinking begins to teeter on the brink of a hall of mirrors. Exactly how much of what's being shown on screen is real and how much is fantasy is the engine that drives this film.
Edit: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061395/trivia?item=tr0641582 Well that's stupid.
No comments:
Post a Comment