Notes on Belle and Simon, esp. Cinematography--Bunuel Review #3

4/5 Belle du Jour (Woman of the Day, 1967, available in Martin Scorsese-sponsored Miramax edition)

5/5 Simon of the Desert (1965, available through the Criterion Collection)

I'd like to start off by saying that Belle de Jour is a very good picture and everyone with an interest in Bunuel should see it and form their own opinion about it. It's a classic of French cinema, a milestone for Surrealist cinema, features some very famous French actors (Catherine Deneuve is famous enough to even get name-dropped in something as mainstream as TV's Gray's Anatomy and Michel Piccoli, who starred in Godard's Contempt, also has a large role--they're both in the picture below.) But in terms of Bunuel's other pictures, in my opinion, it is only a very good picture among a host of total masterpieces.

I have been trying to pinpoint why Belle de Jour has never been a favorite of mine. The film deals with the life of a wealthy young woman who is somewhat frigid with her handsome doctor husband, but has wild masochistic sexual fantasies. She decides to start working at a whorehouse on the first anniversary of their marriage, where she hopes to find her much-wanted sexual degradation. It is definitely an intriguing picture and full of more feminist sentiment than one might expect.

Belle de Jour was Bunuel's first collaboration with Jean-Claude Carriere, who co-scripted almost all of Bunuel's films from this point on (Bunuel always enlisted the help of other writers and he had a particularly good relationship with Carriere, who he maintained a close friendship with until his death.) It is also the first in the string of late art house masterpieces and near-masterpieces that Bunuel made in France in his third and final period of filmmaking. Of the four of these I've seen, I would rank them with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire vying for the first slot, The Phantom of Liberty coming in a close second and Belle de Jour easily in third.

In any case, I think Belle De Jour has a great script and I think it is excellent in it's characterization of Severine (a.k.a. Belle de Jour, played by Catherine Deneuve) and especially so in it's characterization of her jealous lumpen proletarian boyfriend, Marcel (played to perfection by Pierre Clementi), who ends up sending her husband into a wheelchair-bound coma and gets shot down in the street in a scene quite reminiscent of the final moments of Godard's Breathless.

My main problem, actually, is the cinematography. This is strange because the cinematographer Sascha Vierny lensed some of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen, including having a long working relationship with both Alain Resnais--for whom he shot notoriously beautiful films like Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad--and, much later, the little-known, but immensely talented Raul Ruiz, working on Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting and The Three Crowns of the Sailor, among others.

The key may lie again in Bunuel's autobiography, where Bunuel, though he doesn't specifically talk about Vierny, makes fun of people who speak of him as a stylist, because "aesthetic concerns never occupied much of my time." Bunuel is character-driven, plot-driven, idea-driven, and image-driven, but he's right--style is rarely a factor. Although Resnais and Ruiz are in many ways Bunuel's worshiping surrealist disciples, they are definitely very style-oriented filmmakers: Resnais is often accused of ripping off style-as-content avant-garde filmmakers from the U.S. in Marienbad and Ruiz is as much a disciple of Orson Welles' showy, beautiful chiascoro-lit compositions as he is, in every other matter, following in Bunuel's footsteps.

Vierny doesn't seem to have much to do here--there are a lot of complex tracking shots, coming well before the invention of steadicam, which must have been challenging to execute, but seem a little too self-consciously mannered and showy for a great Bunuel film. It's as if Bunuel didn't know what to do with such an arty cinematographer and just left him to rove around the set with a crane. The style in your typical Bunuel film--if you can speak of cinematographic style in his films at all--is very upfront, matter-of-fact and even in-your-face, which is rarely the case here.

The other great cinematographer that Bunuel worked with was Gabriel Figueroa, on his last Mexican film, Simon of the Desert. Figueroa seemed to really understand Bunuel's style and perhaps too, with Simon stuck on top of the pillar for most of the film, there was necessarily less roving around--many of the tracking shots feel extremely economical and there are many gorgeous stationary camera compositions.

Simon of the Desert follows, as I mentioned in another review, the life of a religious ascetic who lives and prays, unwashed and unshaven, on top of a tall, but not very spacious pillar in the middle of the desert.The whole film is a reworking, as I understand it, of Christ's Temptation, and based on the lives of a few saints who actually did habitate the tops of pillars. Simon is filled with some of the most hilarious bits of (sac)religiously-themed humor to be found anywhere, though there are basically only two actors at work for most of the hour long film, Silvia Pinal as the Devil-as-woman-in-various-costumes(and who also played the lead role as the chaste do-gooder in Viridiana) and Claudio Brook as the long-suffering Simon.

Simon of the Desert is definitely one of the masterpieces and I won't even go into the details of the plot any further, which everyone should discover for themselves, and just say that it is one of the most stunning works, visually and otherwise, in a long career filled with various moments of shock and awe.* It is interesting to ponder that many people have referred to Bunuel as one of the most religious of filmmakers, even though half his life's work is explicitly making fun of the Church. The Milky Way, apparently, is so full of clerical in-jokes that some people accused Bunuel of having become a convert. He followed it up with a vicious satire of a the priesthood in Discreet Charm though, and I doubt anyone questioned his religious opinions again.

* (Pauline Kael's review of this film is especially good and a little more critical. A selection of her reviews, which were my movie watching bible for half a year or more can be found at your local library or on my bookshelf, if you're so inclined.)

David Lynch's Inland Empire: My How-To Guide On Watching Arty Barely-Narrative Films and Still Getting Something Out of Them

I realize, starting this, that a lot of people might find Inland Empire a daunting prospect. It is three-hours long, for one. For two, you can't really expect to understand everything that happens in it. Laura Dern, Lynch's longtime muse, plays with at least three different types of characters, even if they are all (possibly) the same person: one is an actress who has just got a part in a big Hollywood film; one is a character played by the actress, identifiable by her southern drawl; and the third is a woman from the streets, who sleeps with men in exchange for drinks.

I think that maybe here in the United States, with our longstanding tradition of heavily plotted narrative film, we tend to enjoy what I've heard referred to (in Jonathan Rosenbaum's writing, and elsewhere, perhaps with origins in the writing of Chilean expat filmmaker Raul Ruiz) as the "cinema of prose"--the great character driven works of Ford, Kurosawa, and Bergman--over the "cinema of poetry"--the works of Godard, Bunuel, Kiarostami, and Resnais, among others. Where in the cinema of prose everything is beautifully extricable, in the cinema of poetry it is simply not. Now Inland Empire is certainly not Stan Brakhage or Maya Deren--non-narrative and even non-representational--but it definitely fits in the "cinema of poetry" camp, much like Lynch's Eraserhead, Lost Highway and, to some extent, Mulholland Drive. And I would argue that you can't watch a movie like this in the same way you would watch The Searchers or Yojimbo. I have a short list of suggestions that should probably work as well for Inland Empire as for Godard's Week End or Ruiz's Three Crowns of the Sailor:

1. Don't get hung up on the dialogue. This may be contradictory to the way people watch movies, but in a movie like this, there are so many non-sequiturs that trying to consciously comprehend everything that is said would make your head spin. Rather than clinging to every bit of dialogue, focus on what mood it evokes, what associations you make with it. The incredible richness of this type of film, as of poetry itself, is in moods and associations.

2. Pay attention to lighting and shot composition. My first Lynch movie was Lost Highway and the friend that I was watching it with started making comparisons between shots from The City of Lost Children and I started making associations with Tarkovsky, and we ended up really enjoying it from this standpoint alone. Contrary to expectation, you don't have to be a hardcore cinephile to enjoy a film from this angle either. There may be a lot of things in Inland Empire, which was shot in a very innovative way with digital video, that you find sheerly beautiful, reminiscent of an Impressionist painter's dreams or nightmares. Just go with it.

3. Know your own mood going into this. Ideally, you should be relaxed, even in daydreaming mode, and prepared to sit in front of the TV for awhile. If you can just sit still and watch even a little distractedly, letting the words and images flow over you, then you will have a better time than if you had a shitty day and desperately need something to watch to take your mind off it. It's likely, if you're in the latter state of mind, that you'll end up turning this off, annoyed, and be driven to drink and fascistic action movies.

I liked Inland Empire quite a bit, perhaps even better than Mulholland Drive. It taps into some dark places somewhere in me and hopefully in a lot of people, is filled with feelings of loss and dejection, and has some of the most gorgeous photography I've seen yet on digital. Give it a try.