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Belle Toujours (2007)

Director: Manoel de Oliveira

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Synopsis

Four decades after Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli engaged in psycho-sexual S&M for Buñuel in ‘Belle du Jour’, 98-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (‘I’m Going Home’) revisits the characters in this intriguing footnote. Piccoli recreates his role as the malicious Husson, but Bulle Ogier steps in for Deneuve.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira’s exquisite movie reunites, 40 years on, the whore and the pimp from Luis Buñuel’s scandalously pure 1967 Paris-set provocation, ‘Belle de Jour’. Michel Piccoli, delightfully, reprises his role as unknowable roué Henri while Bulle Ogier offers a more skittish interpretation of Séverine, the ‘rich, distinguished and beautiful’ housewife whose delicious, illicit and presumably forever-secret sado-masochistic adventures as a siesta-hours prostitute were once enacted by the glacial Catherine Deneuve.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the earlier film: de Oliveira’s elegant, totally self-contained and magnificent miniature of a movie is careful to allude to a scene at the end of Buñuel’s previous one, where Henri whispers something to his best friend, Séverine’s husband, that makes him cry. Did he perhaps betray her betrayal? And how does she feel now, all these years later when, like a spectral ghost, the old cad starts pursuing her for a meeting having spied her accidently alone at the Paris Opéra?

If you have seen ‘Belle de Jour’, however, it’s true that the enticing blend of tribute and play, evocation and variation in ‘Belle Toujours’ becomes more seductively evident. Beautifully, economically, directed, acted and photographed (by Sabine Lancelin), ‘Belle Toujours’ is essentially an affectionate, witty, often farcical jeu d’esprit, sweetly and knowingly bringing together the old-fashioned and the modern. But beneath the surface, it also offers a deceptive, philosophical and cautionary meditation, not only on age, appetite, pleasure, betrayal, mendacity, revenge and disillusionment but also in idle curiosity, which killed the cat, drives Henri and might have made a fool out of Séverine.

Lastly, 99-year-old de Oliveira throws down one mischievous final card which will appeal to lovers of paradox or one-upmanship. What if, like some Borgesian last laugh at Buñuel’s surreal joking, the whole thing is merely some fond old man’s silly reverie? Would that possibly trump the young woman’s sexual fantasy that was ‘Belle de Jour’?

Author: Wally Hammond 2008-11-18 11:16:43

Time Out London Issue 1996, Nov 20-26, 2008

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User reviews of this film

Konk said...

Posted on Nov 21 2008 09:07 Many thanks for revealing the "mischievous final card". I'M SURE I'LL ENJOY IT MUCH MORE NOW

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