04/15/2002 Entry:
"Belle De Jour - Luis Buñuel (1967)"

I'm going to try and make these a little less structured for a variety of reasons. I think they will be more interesting, I think the rambling will promote something (good or bad, we'll see), and sometimes I just want to ramble about things that don't fall under a subject heading. The original idea behind the suject headings was that it would make it easier to find things and hunt down specific entries, but it feels too much like I'm reviewing things, which isn't the purpose. 4/22 Note: Obviously I've changed my mind again

So I saw Belle De Jour today on the train. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I continue to be amazed at how Buñuel can shoot so minimally and draw so much out of the actor and viewer. I talked about this before in my bit on Diary Of A Chambermaid (link) but it continues to strike me. The shots are beautiful, but they don't read as being "lit". Many hollywood films play at using natural light but are obviously lit quite closely (for some reason Out Of Sight springs to mind.) But this film really reads as being naturally lit. I'm curious as to how much this is true. Is it mostly natural? Or do you actually have to try twice as hard to make it look that way? Certainly the colors are quite vivid. The lack of music in the soundtrack just makes the effects stand out so much more, you know everything you're hearing was placed there deliberately. The films just resonate. Buñuel seems to really have a thing about feet and shoes too. The print definitely could have been better (lots of blemishes) but god knows it could have been much worse. Its interesting that this film is constantly labeled as "erotic" because I found it anything but. Maybe its just my lameness that associated "erotic" with "arousal", everything is so detatched in Belle De Jour that it seems impossible to associate arousal with the film at all. All the actual sex scenes are skipped. I would be remiss to not mention the scene of the man with the mystery buzzing item. Hopefully the commentary will be interesting, I'll hit it tomorrow. Tristana shows this weekend at Film Center, I'll do my best to get to it.