Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Belle de Jour
1967 · Luis Buñuel · Belle de Jour on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for cuts that change the world with no dissolve attached. (cutting)
European cinema in 1967 had a whole kit for flagging a daydream. Soft focus, drained color, a furling dissolve, a swell of strings. Buñuel and Vierny use none of it. A fantasy is cut in exactly like a lunch.
Payoff: You often only realize a scene was imagined after it has ended, which means you never get to watch from safe ground. In the reading: powers of the false. Withholding the marker that says which images are real is what the reading calls the powers of the false, truth left undecidable.
Listen for harness bells and notice that no music ever arrives. (sound)
There is no composed score anywhere in the film. Buñuel thought orchestral scoring was emotional manipulation. What you get instead is ambient sound, silence, and the bells of a horse-drawn carriage that keep coming back.
Payoff: With no music telling you how to feel, you have to decide for yourself what you are looking at.
Watch Deneuve's face for what it declines to tell you. (performance)
Buñuel told his actors not to telegraph an inner life, and Deneuve took it completely. Séverine shows composure, brief alarm, blank absorption. She never shows a reason. Jean Sorel plays the husband as genuinely kind, which removes the obvious explanation.
Payoff: You are forced to guess at her, which puts you in the same position as every other character in the film.
Look at the furniture and the clothes in every room. (setting)
The Serizy apartment, the fashionable restaurant, the brothel. All furnished with the same sociological exactness, all belonging to one class. Séverine's wardrobe is Saint Laurent and her clients come from her own world.
Payoff: The two lives are not separate worlds. They share an address book, and the décor keeps telling you so.
Notice how calmly the camera watches the most extreme moments. (staging)
Buñuel blocks for clarity and then holds. No emphasis, no pushing in, no expressive lighting. The room stays ordinary while something disproportionate happens inside it, and the camera simply attends to faces.
Payoff: The flatness is the joke and the threat at once, and it is how Buñuel keeps bourgeois life and raw appetite in one frame.
Once you have seen it
Watch the women's faces when the client opens his small box. (staging)
He shows it, it buzzes, the other women recoil, Séverine looks and agrees. The camera never goes inside. Buñuel said for the rest of his life that he had no idea what was in it either.
Payoff: The film gives the drive an object you cannot see, so nothing about it can be explained away. In the reading: fetish. A charged object the film orbits and never absorbs is what the reading calls a fetish, a part-object carrying compulsive force.
Listen for the carriage bells coming back in the last minutes. (structure)
Pierre rises from the wheelchair. Husson smiles and you cannot read it. The bells return and the film has closed its circle. Three readings are available and the film breaks the tie between none of them.
Payoff: You end where Pierre ends, knowing something has been kept from you and having no way to learn what. In the reading: falsifying-narration. Mutually exclusive versions of events held as equally true is what the reading calls falsifying narration.
Compare how Piccoli and Clémenti take up space in a room. (performance)
Piccoli's Husson is smooth, well dressed, insinuating from inside Séverine's own class. Clémenti's Marcel is volatile, badly fitted to those rooms, and genuinely dangerous. The film escalates by moving her from one register to the other.
Payoff: Her descent is tracked by who is allowed to stand next to her, not by anything she says about herself.
Carry this in: Buñuel flags nothing. The daydreams are shot exactly like the lunches, so watch every scene with the same eyes.