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I must admit to having one hell of a time in deciding whether I truly liked this film or whether I thought it just all rubbish for the scrap heap. Okay perhaps that was a bit strong but in fact I did have the devil of a time in wrangling this one in. On one hand, de Oliveira's film, which is an homage of sorts - perhaps coda is a better descriptive - to Belle de jour and is even dedicated to its writers Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, could not have looked more elegant. Picture perfect eye view from de Oliveira's stoic camera lens and very possibly an homage to Paris itself as well. On the other hand, this is probably a film that should have never even been made.
As if someone told us what happened to Holden Caulfield 40 years after The Catcher in the Rye or whatever became of poor Joseph K. or, God forbid, if someone had written a play where Godot actually finally shows up - exclaiming "better late than never!". Perhaps these are questions that all faithful readers ponder, but these are questions that need no answers. We need no closure on these subjects. This is why they still intrigue us years after first reading or seeing them, and this is exactly what de Oliveira does with Belle Toujours. He gives us one big fat concrete "this is what happened!" when all we need is to be left alone with our fantasies.
After all, de Oliveira has taken something he loves (and in the case of this critic, something which I love as well) - in this particular case, the story of Séverine and her embattled Husson - and by loving it so much has killed it, or at the very least has desecrated its very absurd holiness with the idea of restaging its after-the-credits whodunit. Yet in the end, even though he does place a sensible face where a sensible face certainly does not belong (although I suppose replacing the chilly Catherine Deneuve with the frantic Bulle Ogier is anything but putting a sensible face on something, but...) the 97 year old auteur, has made a beautifully succinct and vibrantly clever picture with the most loving of care. So what if it should have never been made. [06/14/07]
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