Belle de Jour, Arte

December 2, 2024, Paris
I enter a timeless apartment. For months now, I've been soaking up Belle de jour and the life of this «larger than life» man. Opposite me was director Manon Prigent. We talked about Kessel, fantasies, desire and humiliation.

October 14, 2025
Film premiere at the Cristine cinéma club, formerly Action Christine, in Paris. I'm there!

October 22, 2025
The film can be seen on Arte.tv until 21/04/2026. To see it, click here.

The pitch:

Nearly a century after its publication, how should we view Joseph Kessel's novel (transposed to the screen by Luis Bunuel), in which a bourgeois woman discovers pleasure through prostitution? Informed by the analyses of sex workers, this documentary uncovers the book's true subject: male desire.

Work by the adventurous writer Joseph Kessel, Belle de jour features Séverine, a well-to-do young woman, sincerely in love with her husband, who experiences voluptuousness and an unsuspected jouissive submission by pushing open the doors of a brothel. Published in 1928, this novel revolted a corseted, bourgeois France that denied female desire as a threat. In 1967, Luis Buñuel's film adaptation, with Catherine Deneuve oscillating between masochistic pleasure and guilt, only added to the scandal. But who owns Séverine's fantasies? And, a century later, would the story of their fulfillment still trigger outraged reactions?

Mechanics of fantasy
To answer these questions, Manon Prigent brings together, in a timeless apartment, current and former sex workers, who read and comment on passages from the novel in which Kessel exposes the “sex trade".“terrible divorce between heart and flesh”The two women's intimate experiences, and those shared by their clients, are the repositories of society's taboos. Drawing on their own intimate experiences and those shared with them by their clients, and as guardians of society's taboos, they uncover the mechanics of fantasy and, in the light of feminist advances, examine the book's real subject: male desire. A pertinent re-reading, illustrated with archive footage and extracts from Buñuel's film.