The punning title of Belle Toujours is a tipoff to de Oliverira's mindset here. Like the original, his film is mischievous and something of a tease. It begins in a Parisian concert hall, when Michel Piccoli's Henri Husson, the sybarite of the original, is easing into the enjoyment of the coda of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony at a concert when he notices in the audience a few rows ahead of him the Belle of all those years ago Catherine Deneuve then, Bulle Ogier now). His face, puffy with age, is nonetheless responsive and sentient. Hers, stylish, framed by a blond perm, is a mask. At concert's end, he tries to approach her. She spots him, hurries out, steps into a waiting limo, and flees, leaving him on the curb.
Life has evidently left him well-fixed, to judge by his well-tailored conventional clothing, and the fact that we never see him at any kind of work. He clearly is a man who knows his way around, as we see by the way he enters a bar he saw Belle later leave, and pumps the barman (a knowing, yet obliging Ricardo Trepa) for info. Clearly, he means to stalk her, but always in the most well-mannered haute bourgeois way (yes, we're thinking Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie here one of many sly references to Bunuel and his themes). Not that de Oliveira doesn't establish a tone all his own. His views of Paris, mostly at night, and his reiterations of the autumnal strains of the romantic Dvorak symphony, lay the visual and aural groundwork for a certain melancholy.
Almost comically, his efforts to track the elusive Severine Serizy, known as Belle when she would leave her wheelchair-bound husband all those years ago for sex as a part-time prostitute, become delicately bumptious after he tracks her to the hotel where she lives. He's eager to reopen their relationship (he was the husband's best friend, with whom she betrayed the husband she nevertheless loved in her perverted way). Piccoli's Husson spends a certain amount of time trying to align the past and a possible present. He half-explains, half-confesses to the patient barman, while ignoring the pointed remarks of two streetwalkers who are regulars in the bar, his reawakened obsession. To his surprise, the young barman is an insightful confessor.
Finally, he runs into Severine on a street, stops her, and undergoes what clearly is a verbal and sometimes physical tug of war. Here, de Oliveira draws back to show us their convergence in a medium long shot. We don't hear what they say. What we learn is that he has played his only card, and that it works. He will tell her what he whispered into her husband's ear before he died she has wondered and agonized over it for decades if she will agree to an intimate dinner with him. She can't resist.
And so she appears for a candlelight dinner in a private room, attended by three waiters, bearing a few surprises for him. Essentially, they are updates. The Belle he knew then has no connection with the life she has led ever since, she informs him. The fire no longer burns within her, she states. The sexuality she refers to as unbalanced and twisted has died down, she adds. So eager is she to distance herself from her former identity that she's thinking of entering a convent, she concludes. There is further talk of betrayal, masochism, sadism, and a bit of the latter from Husson, whose silken manner becomes blurred by what he freely admits is alcoholism. He'll tell Severine what he said to her late husband as promised, he insists. But not before toying with her first.
That they are not of one mind is made clear when he kisses her hand, saying "Belle toujours, ma cherie," only to have her reply, "I was never your darling." Far from being any sort of sexual conqueror (an idea mocked by an earlier shot of a gilded statue of Joan of Arc riding off to battle), Husson was at the time of their liaison, he learns, merely an instrument of her perversion -- a perversion, she insists, that was buried with her husband. The power game in which he thought he had the upper hand doesn't quite go the way he had imagined. Now, as then, he admits, women remain sexual enigmas to him. The new Belle, with her rueful clarity, is rendered more sympathetically by Ogier than the younger Belle was by Deneuve. Ogier's face communicates a vulnerability and self-awareness not available to the more closed-off visage of Deneuve's younger Belle.
It's not surprising that such retrospective weighing of various pieces of the past and such bemused reflections on memory should figure in the then 98-year-old de Oliveira's film. What's not at all to be taken for granted are the graceful touch he brings to the juggling of them and the twinkling humor epitomized in his final Bunuel homage as he surrealistically has a rooster (cock, if you will) strut in its jerky barnyard way down the corridor of the slightly shabby edifice to which Husson invites Belle. Belle Toujours isn't about sexual combat. It's meditation as meringue.
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by Jay Carr
