Belle Du Jour and Marnie

The rerelease of Luis Bunuel's Belle dujour provides an occasion to reflect upon the psychoanalytic underpinnings of Bunuel's surrealist vision. I shall do so by comparing the film with another overdy psychoanalytically inspired work, Alfred Hitchcock's Mamie , to which, I submit, Bunuel's film has more than a superficial resemblance. Robert Stam has noted the Catholic background and Jesuit education common to both directors that at once inspires the “dominant fantasy at the kernel of the two director's work—the obsessive intertwining of the imagery of love and death,” and the implacable control, the fastidious attention to detail, in their realizations of this fantasy.1 Profoundly different psychoanalytic takes on human motivation underpin these films, neither of which I buy. Both films, to my mind, offer a rather silly picture of human psychology and share a reductive characterization of human sexuality in terms of phallic power and its absence. Yet they both in their own way serve to support works of extraordinary force, and in the case of Belle dujour, a film of great beauty.

Both Belle dujour and Mamie are overtly concerned with the confusion of their respective heroines Severin (Catherine Deneuve) and Marnie (Tippi Hedren) over their socially prescribed gender roles. Both heroines are cold, frigid, blondes played by wooden actresses —Deneuve, exceptionally so—who have been precociously exposed to adult sexuality with the violence (literal or metaphoric) such exposure entails. Bodi women are married to handsome dark-haired patriarchs to whom they deny themselves sexually while sustaining a fertile fantasy life. Both characters lead a double existence, Severin as dutiful wife and prostitute, Marnie as dutiful daughter and thief/impostor. But whereas Mamie's fantasy life is an index of mental illness, and the project of the film, at least of the male lead, is to cure and reintegrate her into society. Severin's fantasy life is a source of delirious liberation from