Rouge

directed by Luis Bunuel, 1967

The film summons fantasies tangled with reality. We are taken through the waking life, through dreams within a dream, through suppressed fantasies that nervously surface. A vintage Buñuel production from his French Era, Belle de Jour is based on the novel by Joseph Kessel and co-scripted by the director and Jean-Claude Carrière. Not finding the original source material very impressive, Bunuel altered accordingly, asserting that- "I found it interesting to try to turn something I didn't like into something I did. There are some scenes in the film, which I'm very pleased with, and others with which I am not at all. But I ought to say I enjoyed total freedom during the shoot and I therefore consider myself entirely responsible for the result."

The central character of Séverine, rich in her complexity unfolds gradually. We watch her stiff in her husband's arms, we are acquainted with her sadomasochistic fantasies, her sexual guilts, her childhood memory of being sexually manhandled and her various stages of involvement in the brothel. The film becomes a catalogue of sexual fetish and bondage from whips, mystery boxes, coffins, chains and quite understandably scandalized the burgeois at the time.

Interesting to note, the author of the original 1929 book wrote in his preface, almost along the lines of a defensive retort, that- ' The subject of Bell de jour is not Severine's sexual aberration; it is her love for Pierre independent of that aberration...'. However in the film itself, eroticism becomes a leitmotif not merely through the protagonist's sexual escapades or the strange clientele of Madam Anais but also through the lingering shots of Severine's body parts- fingers trailing on furniture, shining patent leather shoes briskly moving up the staircase, curves of a leg, stockings, undergarments till the eye becomes a voyeur.

Catherine Deneuve holds the film together, her placid, reserved dewy looks used well to contrast the psychic needs for humiliation and torture. We recall her excellent performance in Polanski's Repulsion [1965], the first of the 'apartment' trilogy- a statement on psychological horror and repressed sexuality. Bunuel uses her to perfection, splicing the narrative with his own subjective metaphors through cats, lily seeds, tinkling bells, keyholes. The minimum use of background music again brings in the sense of alienation and psychological duress.

(Spain, 1995)


Spanish auteur Amenabar's debut feature film is about a film university student who, while investigating for her thesis on audiovisual violence, unwillingly gets caught in a sinister snuff film racket that's being operated from her own university. The film's opening sequence shows a group of passengers being taken out of a tuberail compartment as the train came to a halt due to one passenger who threw himself in front of the train from the platform. A few of the passengers were trying to look at the track to see the dead body, knowing very well that it was "cut in half" and what they were about to see would be extremely repulsive. In this film Amenabar addresses the issue of audiovisual violence in the same fashion. The more repulsive it is, the more attractive it becomes to the audience, a theory which tries to explain the market for snuff films, because they are "uncensored" and the "real deal". In one scene, the central character covers her face and closes her eyes while a snuff film is being shown to her. But as she's hearing the victim's screams and the torture sounds, she opens her one eye slowly and watches through her fingers... and we in the audience can not help but do a little self-criticism.

Another minor issue addressed in the film is the monopoly of Hollywood film industry in popular culture of Spain (and in a broader sense, in all the other countries with rich heritage). In spite of being a student of Spanish cinema, the protagonist Angela's room displays a poster of Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho. Chema, a horror movie fan, is addressed in the film "Ah, here comes Freddy Kruger himself!" and not as some character from a Spanish horror film. A professor in the film urges his students to "give the audience what they want, because that's the reason why Hollywood is so popular and Spanish cinema is going backwards", to which his students cheer enthusiastically. We presume that Amenabar shows all these as a criticism to Hollywoodisation. Yet, ironically, this very film's structure is unmistakably Hollywood-ish, with his original brilliant touches, of course. Also, Amenabar let both this film and its successor Abre los Ojos to be remade in Hollywood. And he himself moved to Hollywood and worked with mainstream actors later in The Others and Agora.

However, the film itself, is an evenly paced one and it kept its ambiguity till the end, let the audience constantly guessing about the identity of the killer. There are a few brilliant sequences, like Chema telling a children's story to Angela as they walk through a matchlit tunnel; or when they are sitting side-by-side watching a snuff film together, with Angela closing her eyes and covering her face and Chema eating potato chips and attentively staring at the screen. The film's music, composed by Amenabar himself, correctly sets the mood for each sequence. Among the actors, Ana Torrent and Fele Martinez are quite brilliant in this film.

The most interesting feature of the film is that it kept its subtle neutrality about audiovisual violence throughout. Angela dislikes it, but Angela's views are not blatantly supported by the film itself, although she is the protagonist. In the end, the film shows a television news programme being attentively watched by a hospital staff, which shows violent footages from a snuff film, with the newscaster 'apologizing' to the audience for its violent nature but feels that it would be 'educational' to show them anyway.