Back to Back 45 - Taste the Whip in Love Not Given Lightly

Contrasting films that take BDSM as something more than a titillating game

Belle de Jour (1967) - director Luís Buñuel, co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière
The Piano Teacher (2001) -director/writer Michael Haneke

Severin, Severin, speak so slightly
Severin, down on your bended knee
Taste the whip, in love not given lightly
Taste the whip, now bleed for me!
Velvet Underground “Venus in Furs”

Pant! Pant! Slap! This is how erotic films about BDSM fantasies are supposed to go. Some buildup, some will-they-won't-they, then the close-in tease, the heavy breathing, then the release. Secretary (2002) did it very well, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and sequel did it very boringly.

Belle de Jour does it not at all; it's entirely characteristic of Buñuel that he refuses to play the game, to gratify the viewer's libido with something smooth and slinky about a sub lady's journey of sexual exploration. Being Buñuel, it is oddly cold and alienated, the observations of human activity as a strange and inexplicable species. Michael Haneke would follow the same paradigm with The Piano Teacher (2001) which is arguably an even greater film about a person whose perverse desires fracture her ego completely, allowing all the mess to leak out.

And, just incidentally, Buñuel has co-created in this film the mysterious box with no solution given, the ultimate tease that itches at the edge of the viewer's consciousness and won't let go. Though it was already present in the Kiss Me Deadly (1955) as what would later be called a MacGuffin, here in the Mongolian's box we have the pure mystery box itself, which would leave the boychild J.J. Abrams appalled: a thing which has no explication, no place in the plot, which causes terror in everyone except Belle, which apparently draws blood, and leaves her stupefied with sexual satiety. "It must be painful," says Pallas the housekeeper (Muni), clearing up afterwards. "What do you know?" drawls the groggy and smirking Belle, more satisfied that at any other moment in the film.

Buñuel complained that people's only comments on the film were questions about what's in the box, and interesting theories abound. One fascinating lead from Kimberly Lindbergs in Cinebeats film blog references a "titillating tale" in de Sade of Seminole women in Florida "who supposedly made their men place 'small poisonous insects in their male members until they swelled up tremendously and caused an insatiable libido.'" Ouch! Whether or not it's accurate as a reference for the contents of the Mongolian's box, it sure rings true as the kind of thing that would strike Buñuel as a fun Sadean story, and it's true that the box does emit an insect-like buzzing.

So what's in this story of a bourgeois Parisian housewife, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve) clad in YSL haute-couture and living in the most impeccably good-taste apartment imaginable, who cannot bring herself to reveal her desires to her loving surgeon husband? The film opens, shockingly, on an idyllic little jaunt in the countryside in a carriage that turns into violent abuse of Séverine complete with horsewhipping and rape by the coachman. It turns out, of course, that it's all in her head, and the jingling of coach bells will signal her erotic reveries from now on.

She tells hubby Pierre (Jean Sorel) that she's been thinking about the carriage again. "Again, the carriage?" he exclaims. But what has she really told him about the carriage ride? Has she really been truthful about what she fantasises in these reveries? If she had, surely Pierre would get the hint and realize that a bit of sub-dom sexplay would be the way to break through her frosty exterior. But apparently either she or he considers that delving into that whole... thing... would be infra dig, as they used to say, in breach of the proper decorum for married folk of good standing.

One interpretation of the overarching meaning of this enigmatic story (though it is surely the most accessible of the late Buñuel films, and not accidentally the most commercially successful) is that provided in the BFI monograph on the film by Michael Wood:

Buñuel is more likely to be suggesting that there are no aberrations, only human beings trying to find their way through the deceptions and denials of their own desire. His characters are free in the end not because they escape an interior or exterior fatality but because the very idea of destiny is mocked at every turn of their story, and begins to look like the fantasy of moralists who can’t face the random surprises of the world or the heart.
Michael Wood, Belle de Jour [BFI Film Classics] (2000) p42

By this reading, it is Séverine/Belle's failure to come clean to her husband both about her desires for submission and her secret life as prostitute, and his patent failure to breach her reticence despite all his gentle concern, that bring about the tragedy - if indeed tragedy it really is. Their bourgeois conditioning simply cannot accept the freedom to explore these desires, these murky facets of their lives. Ironically, Husson (Michel Piccoli) the louche aristocratic cynic so detested by Séverine/Belle would be a much better partner for her than caring Pierre, simply because, in the Sadean tradition, he has no boundaries and can easily accept her true nature though he despises her bourgeois hypocrisy in hiding it.

Everything about the film, though carefully planned and shot, is slightly off, in the typical Buñuelian mode of disconcerting the viewer with offbeat cuts, unexplained cutaways (to shoes, ornaments, wheelchairs...), and slightly janky camerawork. All of those jagged elements are intentional, as Buñuel couldn't bear the smooth polished cinematography and editing of established Hollywood and French commercial cinema, yet another aspect, for him, of comfortable bourgeois coddling.

There's also the complete absence of a music soundtrack, another obligatory element of romantic drama that he wished to avoid. Instead the film delights in foley work emphasising the strangeness - the jingly bells which are not of Christmas sleighs, the insect buzzes and cat's miaows - of the soundscape of a person as fragmentary as our protagonist.

He relished the spiky, the unsetlling, the discombobulating, even in this, the smoothest and most polished film of his late French colour era, the one with an actual story you can understand a little bit. Only the interjections of Sdaean fantasy and the ending itself rupture the smoothness of the bourgeois-erotic tale. So what is the ending, the apparently double ending of despairing tragedy and/or redemption?

The ending’s ambivalence in visual terms - two images superimposed, city and transgressive forest

Buñuel said quite emphatically:
There aren’t two endings, only one ambiguous ending. I don’t understand it. This indicates a lack of certainty on my part. It’s the moment where I don’t know what to do, I have various solutions, and don’t decide on any of them. So in the ending I put my own uncertainty into the film. It’s happened to me before.
We don’t have to take him entirely literally, and probably shouldn’t. But the sense of ambiguity is unambiguous, and perfectly matches what we see on the screen.
Wood, p45

This is matched by the apparent clumsiness of having husband Pierre find an empty wheelchair at the midpoint of the film, a clear and awkward foreshadowing of the conclusion. There's universal recognition of the awfulness of this moment, but considerable disagreement as to what it means and how much Buñuel was playing at being deliberately bad and obvious as a distancing effect, the classic Brechtian Verfrumdungseffekt which forces us out of the story as 'real narrative' into a place where we perceive the artifice as artifice. Wood again goes into this:

The hapless husband, surely, is looking at an image of destiny so crudely and literally put in his way, so thoroughly beyond his possible comprehension, that it mocks the very thought of destiny. And what is impossible for him is too easy for us. The film at this moment looks like a story anxious to give itself away, like a joke that has arrived at its punch-line too soon, and is already stumbling to get back on track.

Why would Buñuel do this, can there be any mileage in simulating ineptitude? None at all. The ineptitude, in a limited sense, is quite real. ‘He leaves in miscalculations,’ Pauline Kael says, ‘and fragments that don’t work — like the wheelchair on the sidewalk in Belle de Jour' This is a fragment that couldn’t work. Buñuel can’t believe in the closure, or even the seriousness, of plot, and like a person achieving irony through overpoliteness, expresses his doubts in the form of excess... ‘I put my own uncertainty into the film,’ Bunuel said.
He did something more durable and substantial than that. He made a picture of uncertainty out of the certainties he showed us how to fail to reach.
Wood, p69

The cryptic nature of this final statement - "he made a picture of uncertainty out of the certainties he showed us how to fail to reach" - is itself an example of the same thing, a metatextual distancing effect from the very act of critiquing Buñuel in essay form. It forces us to read its looping logic again, to realise that we are, in the Buñuel universe, expected to try to fail to reach any form of certainty. In other words, to reach any form of certainty about what the narrative 'means' is a very great failure on our part, a failure we must resist by cultivating uncertainty, and Buñuel is here to help by throwing doubt on every single element in the story.

And with all that carefully-cultivated uncertainty in mind, we can go on to consider what another BDSM story uncertainly means, and what it almost certainly doesn't.

— INTERMISSION —

Bondage sex and S&M are the fetish thing. That's the new thing, isn't it? For the under 40s. Which they think they've invented, because they read about it in Fifty Shades of Grey... You know the proper bondage sex that we used to have in the 80s, in the 70s...? Proper, degrading. If you weren't in hospital at the end of it, you'd done it wrong.
Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee: Content Provider (2018)

A cold, hard and cruel film derived from a cold, hard and cruel source, Elfriede Jelinek's 1983 novel. The action remains in the novel's out-of-time Vienna of classical conservatoires but swaps out the German language for French, mostly one suspects so that Haneke can use Isabelle Huppert in the title role of piano teacher Erika Kohut. It's to Viennese music professors what Taxi Driver (1977) was to NYC yellow-cab drivers - deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable to watch, yet compelling and powerful.

Just as with Scorsese's film, the nagging question remains, Why am I watching this, subjecting myself to this harsh experience? Am I just a voyeur indulging myself in misery-porn and shock-exploitation? And in a film where Isabelle Huppert sits poised on the edge of the bathtub, razor blade in hand, ready to perform some genital self-mutilation, the question becomes urgent. The question is posed directly to the viewers in Funny Games (1997) but although unspoken here, is equally insistent. What am I watching it for?

For the cinephile the question almost doesn't need answering. One can glory in the austere Bressonian control of framing and camera, the austere mise-en-scène that Haneke is famous for, that icy precision of style. But what about - for want of a better term - normal people? What are non-cinephiles to take away from this? Is there any value in this film other than its highly-crafted form, something that justifies the shock of all this outré behaviour and extreme confrontation with violence and despair?

There's a struggle to extract some kind of moral message from the film, and critics steeped in liberal humanism are hardly up to that struggle. Roger Ebert's attempt to deliniate a lesson is extraordinarily cringeworthy:

There is an old saying: Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. The Piano Teacher has a more ominous lesson: Be especially careful with someone who has asked for you.

This is glibness extended to the bounds of absolute meaninglessness. Its obvious employment as a resounding final line hardly excuses its farting-through-trumpets banality.

At The New York Mutha-Fuckin Times, Stephen Holden has a much better go of it, identifying several strands of moral commentary:

The Piano Teacher has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse... you sense the director thumbing his nose and asking us the same question the movie poses to Erika: "Is this really what you wanted?" In our case, it is a vicarious kinky thrill...
But the issue of voyeurism is only one layer of this film, which is also a glum, post-Freudian meditation on sex, power, repression and Western high culture and the relationship between high art and sexuality...
Erika is so immersed in the world of art that she imagines that the transcendent paradox of great Romantic music [Schubert] - it maintains a magisterial control even while losing its mind - applies to life as well as art. The saddest message of this almost-great film may be that art and life are not the same and should not be confused.

I quote this piece at length because it actually gets to grips with some of the important themes in the film, the why-you-should-see-it and also importantly the why-you-should-think-about-it, because the Bressonian, detached style that Haneke mainly adopts invites you to contemplate and not react viscerally to the extremity of the drama. It's a film for considering and not for feeling, though there are some important exceptions, as when Erika lies on the floor of the gym storage closet and reaches out a hand to lover Walter - to us - in desperate supplication.

This moment, in which the camera moves freely, untethered from its usual static and detached stance of distant observer and placing us in the role of participant, invites us just this once to step inside the empathy circle and actually feel Erika's pain. It's a critical moment, equivalent to a moment of Bressonian release and transcendence, though its abject nature is the very opposite of the soaring spirituality that Bresson is aiming at. Later, in the climactic scene, we will encounter Erika again abject on the floor, we will be low to the floor along with her, and our empathy with her, our understanding of her very great mistake, will hardly fail.

That's to say, the film is not as cold and dispassionate as it appears to be. Though it is difficult, nearly impossible, to sympathise with a character as harsh, domineering and (pardoxically) sadistic as Erika, for all our understanding of her past trauma, the film achieves this through her changing response to the abject, the foul margin of life that bourgeois society doesn't like to admit. Erika travels into this degrading and degraded world of humiliation and clandestine pleasure many times, and in each case appears in control of her own destiny. When faced down by the men in the porn store, she meets their gaze with calm confidence.

Only once, when faced with actual violence from the outraged man at the drive-in, does she panic and run. It's a foreshadowing of the authentic violence to come. But in all other cases she is apparently secure in her contact with the taboo, with the "filth" of semen, blood and urine, of hardcore porn and the paraphernalia of hardcore bondage fetishism.

Julia Kristeva had a lot to say on this abjection, this contamination (from society's perspective) of filth. Indeed she suggested that authority (and let's not forget that Erika is struggling throughout to exert her cultural and sexual authority) is expressed entirely by taboos and instructions not-to-do this or that - for example not to play Schubert that way, not to touch me in that way, and so on:

Through frustrations and prohibitions, this authority shapes the body into a territory having areas, orifices, points and lines, surfaces and hollows, where the archaic power of mastery and neglect, of the differentiation of proper-clean and improper-dirty, possible and impossible, is impressed and exerted. It is a "binary logic," a primal mapping of the body... Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self's clean and proper body.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980) p72

It is maternal authority that Erika rebels against, whose abject humiliation she wants to hear on the other side of the door as she indulges in her BDSM fantasies, and it is maternal authority we see at work also in the overbearing mother of the young student Anne, an exact duplicate of Erika's mother and herself. The sickness is perpetuated in this strict theatre of cruelty, of enforcing obedience to the prohibitions, of the warping of desire. The Freudian story is typically enacted between mothers and sons, or more forcefully with paternal authority and its more overt threat of violent retribution. Here the all-female context of all this repression reminds us of Genet's cruel drama The Maids (1947) and all its film and even opera adaptations.

But there is a male presence, that of Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel). He has everything: a wealthy cultured background, handsome looks, a fine education, and the divine self-assurance that comes with all that. So what does he see in Erika? In the novel it's clearly established to be a kind of idle notch-carving exercise, a chance to be with - and say he's been with - an attractive older woman, just another life experience. In the film it seems to be something like what he proclaims, a romantic love finally crushed by disgust at her perverse desires.

But there's always the possibility that he senses something of the masochist in her, and the sadistic desire not to just play a kinky BDSM game, but to actually make her truly suffer. It's significant that his decision to really make a play on her is triggered by his realisation that she carried out the terrible violence against the helpless Anne - a scene not in the book, and so inserted by Haneke here for a reason.

So in the end, there really are reasons to watch this painful film beyond the cinephile fetishism of finely composed frames and elegant editing and mise-en-scène. But they are deeply uncomfortable reasons that involve entering into a kind of communal relationship with cruelty, power relations and the reasons behind the urge to inflict suffering on others. That's to say, it forms another installment in Haneke's grand project to confront us with our shadow and to - in the psychoanalytical sense - integrate ourselves with it. It really is a long way from presenting us with trite moral lessons in the liberal humanist tradition, but rather something altogether more risky and uncomfortable, like a particularly rough session in therapy.

NOTE

This essay by Moira Weigel at Criterion is particularly recommended for an insight into the relation, and some significant differences, between the source novel and the film