Russian cinemas are releasing “Beauty of the Day” (1967), one of the most scandalous films by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and French film star Catherine Deneuve. Well familiar with the latter, Andrey Plakhov recalls the decades-long fate of this cult film in Russia and the world.
Having written a letter to Catherine Deneuve in my youth, impressed by her role in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I received a response that, among other things, said: “It’s a pity that you didn’t see me in Belle de Jour, but this film will never, under any circumstances, be shown in the Soviet Union.” And it turned out that Catherine was right. Although I have heard legends that this film was brought to some closed screenings and was even shown “as pornography” to workers who were building the dacha of the head of the Union of Cinematographers, it is difficult to verify the authenticity of such rumors.
But I am well aware that a copy of the film was kept in the State Film Fund on the shelf of the so-called moral special storage (there was also a “political” shelf), being inaccessible even to film experts. It was only during the period of perestroika that the scandalous film was released into limited release.
Over the years, “Beauty of the Day” began to be perceived by many as a classic of erotic cinema. But Buñuel always emphasized that the most daring scenes in the film were daring jokes, in no way pornography, and that even an eight-year-old child could watch them. This may be an exaggeration, but “Beauty of the Day” is indeed characterized by chastity, as if incompatible with the plot about a married woman of a respectable circle, looking for thrills in a dating house, where she goes as if she were working from two to five. The plot is borrowed from an old Parisian joke, turned into a novel by the writer Joseph Kessel, but Buñuel, taking it as a basis, decisively turned the arrows.
Instead of a piquant psychodrama with emotions, he sculpted a surreal satire, which prompted us to remember the avant-garde origins of Buñuel’s work, about the “Un Chien Andalou” that caused a stir. The lines between imagination and reality in “Beauty of the Day” are so blurred that daytime absences into another existence can be mistaken for the fantasies of the main character Severine.
In the finale, her blind, wheelchair-bound husband learns about his wife’s adventures. But no anger, no heavy punishment: instead, he invites her to sit in the landau and take a walk in the park.
Having regained his sight as a deceived spouse, he also regains his sight as a blind man, a victim of a physical illness. One contradicts the other according to the logic of reality, but coexists perfectly in the surreal anti-world of the film. The dream turns out to be a reality, and the reality surpasses the improbability of a nightmare. The veil of darkness falls, and only the meowing of cats off-screen, which accompanied the heroine’s escapades, reminds of what she has experienced. Or maybe he didn’t exist at all?
Having discovered the sadomasochistic underside of the modest charm of the bourgeoisie, Buñuel did not spare the leftist revolutionaries, who also turn out to be clients of the brothel, whose whims are satisfied by the perverted bourgeoisie. But the director never crossed the red line beyond which accusatory pathos and a statement of “his position” begin. Having diagnosed social schizophrenia in the image of Severine, Buñuel gave him a new quality of volume.
The director Catherine Deneuve, who fearlessly took the path of radical cinema, became an ideal assistant in this. Her heroine in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg by Jacques Demy is a fragile virtue who turned into a conformist and betrayed her love. A year later, in the schizophrenic thriller “Repulsion” by Roman Polanski, she plays a girl with the face of an angel, capable of stabbing a man with a razor. However, her “terrible” female characters, these monsters and furies, are not perceived as monsters. Infected with evil, they are both its instruments and victims. Now they would say that they are traumatized by the male world; Then these concepts simply did not exist.
For the role of the “daytime beauty” and the most experienced actress (Deneuve was only 23) it would not have cost anything to break her neck. But there is not a drop of vulgarity in the portrait of her heroine. Among the night beauties – professional prostitutes – she is the only daytime beauty who has crept into their family, a kind of Alice through the erotic looking glass. She seems unaffected by dirt: Severine cannot be called immoral. Just like the world to which it is opposed is not moral: good and evil have lost their tangible appearance.
The face of young Deneuve is not yet the notorious “ice mask”, but a delicate face, reminiscent of high-quality porcelain images. Their impenetrable perfection hurts, they contain artless art, simple-minded sophistication.
This is precisely what Buñuel made the basis of the internal plot of the film, and Deneuve finally designated the role of her acting youth – “the triumph of ambiguity.” For this courage, she received an enthusiastic comment from Martin Scorsese, who said that not a single one of today’s young actresses would dare to take on such a risky role. And further: “It is clear that Catherine Deneuve is one of the most beautiful women in cinema. But with a keen understanding of what her beauty looks like on screen, she achieves the astounding result of subverting it while leaving it intact and sparkling. In this sense, she is unique.”
The scene of one of the dreams, where lumps of dirt fly right into Severina’s face, raises questions these days from apologists of the “new ethics”: where is the line beyond which creativity ends and the humiliation of the actor’s personality begins? But in Buñuel’s time, collecting injuries had not yet become common practice—and on film sets, too. The director, known for his fantastic pace of work, shot the film in Paris in 8 weeks, edited it in 12 hours (!) and, returning to Mexico, announced that he was leaving cinema and that “Beauty of the Day” was his last film work. But he did not keep his word and before his death he managed to shoot several more masterpieces, including Tristana, again with Catherine Deneuve.
