Belle de jour (1967)

You wanna see a film about why it is the unacknowledged desire of women to become prostitutes? Watch Belle de jour, in which Luis Bunuel makes the tired claim that bourgeois morality puts shackles onto the deep drives of women. Somebody called this film a comedy. I don't get it. Maybe it's the time gap that is to be blamed, but I didn't see anything particularly amusing here. Or maybe one or two things here and there. One can of course say that Bunuel uses the film language in an imaginative way, blurring the difference between fantasy and reality and teasing us with small hints and riddles. I guess that's all right. But let's be blunt: this is a sexist movie trying hard to be radical, putting young & beautiful Catherine Deneuve as its perverse heroine. Women don't understand themselves, Bunuel seems to say. Deneuve is the unhappy wife of a medical student. Their sex life is nothing to write home about. A strange man gives small hints to her and she finds her way to a brothel, in which she becomes employed, nervously tending to the needs of creepy guys. We learn that this girl prefers the rougher treatments. She works the afternoon shifts, acting as the respectable wifey during the night. Basically, Belle de jour strikes me as the ultimate male fantasy: what if all women, under that clean and neat surface, are prostitutes willing to do anything? Maybe there are no real women, and no real sex, as everything takes place in the mind anyway? Women never cares about anything but - themselves. Their gazes are directed inwards (remember Zizek's lacanian analyses). Every woman has a Secret. As any male fantasy, this one is not particularly interesting.