#bunuel

Bomb a Lil Joy — "Baby Blue"

New band from Eugene Robinson (Oxbow) and Christian McKenna (End Christian)

ft. Justin K Broadrick, Colin Marston (Gorguts), Kevin Hufnagel (Dysrhythmia), Anda Szilagyi, Joe Venango. Track 1 produced by jesu.

Lament (jesu Mix)

Baby Blue

Our Great Sorrow

Saigon

BK

Fight

Everything U R Doing

Unpaid Attorney

Saigon Too

Fields

Out December 5th via Translation Loss.

Pre-order digital: LINK Pre-order vinyl/CD: LINK

Stream music video "Unpaid Attorney"

"There are no active words or sounds to get people to understand that Bomb a Lil Joy will hit just a little bit differently than whatever else they’ve listened to before, now, or in the foreseeable future, when music comes to you in a dream, like all of this came to Christian, it deserves a rendering that was/is also dreamlike … and with G-d as my witness, that’s precisely what I did.” — Eugene Robinson

C'est fou comme les gens ont de moi cette image de femme sophistiquée, glaciale. C'est une telle erreur, c'est tellement mal me connaître.

- Catherine Deneuve on herself in Belle de Jour (1967)

In anticipation of a new film this summer by Catherine Deneuve called ‘Bernadette’ where she plays Bernadette Chirac, the wife of French Jacques Chirac, I’ve been re-watching some her back catalogue of films. She’s done over 64 films and at almost 80 years old she’s still going strong. And yet out of her many films I’ve always been drawn back to one film which has become a cult classic. Watching it and re-watching it and even gorging on books on its making, new intriguing details reveal themselves about this landmark French art house classic - Belle de Jour (1967).

I once had the privilege of having dinner with her - or rather sat around the same table - through a Parisian host and his lovely wife who had gathered an eclectic group of friends across generations together. I was too self-conscious to talk about her film career directly. I was on surer ground when we indulged in small talk where she was perfectly down to earth and very pleasant. I felt it would be rude to go all fan girl on her and pepper her with questions about Belle de Jour in particular as she’s known to be very ambivalent about her experience of the film - a film that really defined her in the eyes of many people.

But it didn’t mean she didn’t recognise its cultural importance though as she was quite happy to amuse us with a funny story about Belle de Jour. A newly restored 35mm version was funded by the fashion house Saint Laurent back in 2018. Deneuve always had a close relationship with Yves Saint Laurent and also the fashion house. She was the one to introduce Buñuel to Saint Laurent. So the fashion house had a glitzy premiere in New York. But they didn’t count on many of their guests being late. Most of the guests were stuck in the New York traffic and the rain. However Martin Scorsese was the only one to get out of cab and run like a mad man through the pelting rain and huge traffic. A true cinephile, he was so desperate to see the film restored to its former glory that he would go to any lengths to see it.

In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve, whose limpid beauty is capable of sustaining any interpretation, is a perfect Severine and demonstrates a remarkable control in progressing, with enormous economy of gesture and movement, from frigidity to physical warmth as the bored housewife who indulges in part time sex work.

“I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used. I was very unhappy.”

The story of Séverine, a deeply disenchanted haute bourgeois Paris housewife who finds erotic liberation through byzantine psycho-sexual fantasies and part-time work at an upscale brothel, Belle de jour certainly made extreme demands of Deneuve: her character is flogged, raped, and pelted with muck, among other assaults. But despite her objections to the way she was treated and her difficulties with Buñuel, Deneuve’s performance in Belle de jour turned out to be one of her most iconic.

Deneuve, who had become a star only three years earlier, as the melancholy jeune fille in Jacques Demy’s 1964 all-sung musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, was just twenty-three when Belle de jour came out; notably, Buñuel’s film was released in France less than three months after Demy’s radiant, MGM-inspired musical The Young Girls of Rochefort, starring Deneuve and her real-life sister Françoise Dorléac.

But Belle de jour, more than any other film from the first decade of her career, defined what would become one of the actress’s most notorious personae: the exquisite blank slate lost in her own masochistic fantasies and onto whom all sorts of perversions could be projected. (Deneuve as deviant tabula rasa was first seen in Roman Polanski’s 1965 Repulsion, in which she plays a damaged beauty plummeting into psychosis; but Belle de jour doesn’t portray its heroine as mad, instead remaining deliberately ambiguous about the origins of her unconventional desires - and presaging the bizarre libertines she would later play in such films as Marco Ferreri’s Liza, 1972, and Tony Scott’s The Hunger, 1983.)

Le journal d'une femme de chambre (1964)

“No one has any idea of all the worries that servants have to put up with, nor of the monstrous way in which they are continually exploited. If it's not the employers, it's the registry offices or some charitable institution—not to mention your fellow servants, for some of them are pretty foul. No one has the slightest concern for anyone else. Everybody lives, grows fat, amuses himself at the expense of someone more miserable and hard-up than himself. However much the scene may change or the background be transformed, however different or hostile the social setting, men's passions and appetites remain the same. Whether it is in a cramped, middle-class flat, or some banker's luxurious town house, you find the same beastliness, the same inexorable fate. When all's said and done, the truth is that a girl like me is defeated even before she starts, wherever she may go and whatever she may do . . . poor human dung, nourishing the harvest of life and happiness for the rich to gather and use against us . . .

There is supposed to be no more slavery nowadays. But that's all rubbish. What about servants? What are they, I'd like to know? In practice, they are simply slaves, with all that slavery entails—the moral degradation, the inevitable corruption, the spirit of revolt that breeds hatred . . . It is the masters who teach servants to be vicious. However pure and simple-hearted they may be when they start—and some of them are—they are soon corrupted by the depravity they come in contact with. They find themselves surrounded by vice, everything they see, breathe or touch is vicious. And so from minute to minute, from day to day, they begin to adapt themselves to it, for far from being able to defend themselves against it, they find themselves on the contrary, obliged to wait upon it, pamper it, respect it. And the spirit of revolt arises from the fact that they are powerless either to satisfy it or to break the shackles that prevent its natural development. It's really quite extraordinary. They expect us to have all the virtues, all the resignation, all the heroism and readiness for self-sacrifice, but only those vices that flatter their vanity and further their interests. And for this, all we get in return is their contempt—and wages that vary between thirty-five and ninety francs a month . . . No, it's fantastic! . . . And, on top of all this, we have to live in a state of perpetual struggle, of constant fear, between the semi-luxury of having a job one day, and, the next, having to face the squalor of unemployment; knowing that, whatever we do, we are always under suspicion, so that they are forever bolting doors, padlocking drawers, locking up cupboards, marking bottles, counting every cake and plum, and even have the nerve to search our pockets and our trunks as though they were detectives. There's not a single door or cupboard in this place, not a drawer or a bottle, that isn’t continually shouting at us: ‘Thief, thief, thief!’ And, as it all this wasn't enough, we have to put up with the constant irritation of seeing the terrible inequality, the appalling contrast between our lot and theirs, so that despite their familiarity with us, despite all their smiles and little gifts, an impassable gulf exists between us and them, a whole world of unspoken hatred, of suppressed envy, of longing for revenge . . . a contrast that, at every minute of the day, is made more blatant and humiliating by the whims, and even by the kindnesses of these unjust, loveless creatures, which is what rich people always are . . . Do they ever, for one single moment, consider what bitter and legitimate hatred we must feel, how we must long to kill them . . . yes, kill them . . . when we hear them, in order to describe something low and ignoble, saying, with a disgust that denies all common humanity: 'He has the manners of a servant . . . She is as sentimental as a servant girl . . .’ Under such conditions, what do they expect us to become? Do these women really imagine that I, too, wouldn't like to wear beautiful dresses, drive about in fine carriages, flirt with my lovers . . . yes, and even employ servants? . . . And then they lecture us about devotion, about being honest and faithful . . . I only wish their words would choke them, the cows!” - Octave Mirbeau, ‘The Diary of a Chambermaid’ (1900) [p. 211 - 213]

SUBLIME CINEMA #537 - SIMON OF THE DESERT

Luis Bunuel took a certain glee in taking down the fanatics of the world; the rich and the powerful, and the religious and hypocritical. His movies alternated depending on his circumstance between Spanish, Mexican, French, effortlessly, though he never sold his own soul to make something he didn’t want to make. 

He also had a kind of personal axe to grind. Previous to Simon of the Desert, he made ‘Viridiana’ in his native Spain, which was so scandalous that he was actively persecuted by the Vatican, sending him in exile to Mexico. When he decided to produce this film there, you can guess who he most intended to piss off with it.