Crackle of strangeness … Catherine Deneuve in Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de Jour. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Just too a week agone, Dr Brooke Magnanti, a post-doctoral researcher in medical science, outed herself as “Belle De Jour” in an interview with the Sunday Times and since on that account the controversy has rumbled onward. Sceptics think that Dr Magnanti’s account of herself is evasive and embellished, and that she has dishonestly glamourised prostitution. Last night, each edition of Radio 4′s The Moral Maze was devoted to it.
Needing cash to complete her PhD, Dr Magnanti signed on with a high-class escort agency and worked from 2003 to late 2004, seeing “clients” onward average two or three times a week, charging £300 per sixty minutes, of that the agency took £100. So if she worked for, say, a year and a half, and never saying the same client twice, at that time she would have got through between 156 and 234 paying punters. Of course these numbers are all-but-meaningless guesswork. What is clear is that she started writing a funny blog about life as a high-class prostitute, which became bestselling books and a TV show.
- Belle De Jour
- Production year: 1967
- Country: France
- Cert (UK): 18
- Runtime: 100 mins
- Directors: Luis Bunuel
- Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Genevieve Page, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli
But I am struck by to what degree little this story and attendant controversy, being of the kind which it now plays out, resembles the Belle de Jour movie from 1967 by Luis Buñuel, from which Dr Magnanti takes her nom de guerre – either in terms of comedy or complexity. In the film, Catherine Deneuve’s rich, bored huswife becomes drawn into prostitution out of ennui, and there are hints of personal trauma behind this choice. She certainly never seems “empowered” in the way that Magnanti believed herself to be, and is never witty or smart like the Belle de Jour blogger, but Magnanti’s tale has nothing like the fascinating, radioactive crackle of strangeness of Buñuel, and does not regard his dark surreal comedy.
The film-maker manages to make the “real” and “respectable” world of his Belle de Jour’s non-prostitute life look neurotic, artificial and mad – a piece of role-play each bit considered in the state of contrived as the shadowy world of sex and whippings for riches. And Buñuel achieves this, in member, by quietly indicating a simple deceit that I have seen nowhere discussed in all the acres of newsprint about the Magnanti put in a box. This isn’t just about the phenomenon of some outwardly respectable woman privately becoming a prostitute, but the phenomenon of outwardly respectable men secretly using prostitutes. You can’t have some without the other: yet it seems only to have being the first phenomenon which causes agony among the media commentariat.
Buñuel’s film shows a comfortable, sophisticated world in which everybody knows it is happening, these respectable married men using prostitutes, but no one admits to it. Now, certainly Magnanti is aware of this hypocrisy and doublethink moreover, but for Buñuel it creates more than just irony: it creates a feverish surreality. Buñuel is anarchic and disturbing in a way that Dr Magnanti isn’t: he sees unnatural contortion and hears a batsqueak of uncouthness everywhere: even, or perhaps especially, in bourgeois areas of life which do not involve sexual transgression. Compared to Buñuel, the Belle de Jour blog is bland.
Lynn Barber, in her memoir An Education, says that for male interviewees, she keeps the dispute “Have you ever used prostitutes?” in coldness as a “Russian roulette” option. The subject could just say no, or erupt with madness, or storm out of the interview, or conceivably pour his heart aloud. In any event, the response will be attractive, the whole that it is. There have been occasional revelations: Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Dennis Potter revealed that he was a compulsive frequenter of prostitutes; VS Naipaul told the New Yorker that he was once “a great prostitute man”. Tolstoy, in extreme old age, famously astonished and embarrassed his house-guest Anton Chekhov by cheerfully avowing very much the same object and asking about Chekhov’s proclivities.
By and large, yet, the hush of secrecy and shame is maintained. Dr Magnanti’s self-outing certainly points up the inflection for sex double-standard on the edition of prostitution. But I’ve always judgment that walk of life herself “Belle de Jour”, gives Dr Magnanti’s story a Buñuelian richness and fascination that it doesn’t have.
