Much of the aesthetic and symbolic success of The Smiling Madame Beudet’s dream sequences is the result of the mise-en-scene (shot composition) within a shot or its location within the house. For this reason, looking at the floorplan of the apartment and the layout of props provides a unique, comprehensive look at Dulac’s work. It is worthwhile to examine the areas where dreams were located, such as the window through which Monsieur Beudet surreally enters, to obtain a greater understand of how Dulac achieved her visual effects, and also to gain a more informed understanding of the each dream’s symbolism and meaning based on where it took place. Aside from its significance to the dream sequences, the apartment floorplan is also of interest because it gives a more total and therefore in depth look at the small apartment that acts as a prison for Madame Beudet. While reading the pages in this section of the website that discuss the three major dream sequences from the film, one can gain an improved perspective by referring back to these diagrams that provide a bird’s eye view of the apartment.
Both Madame Beudet and Monsieur Beudet have dreams in the bedroom. Monsieur Beudet sits in the chair by the door and dreams of a girl from the theater production he went to see, representing his inner desires. Madame Beudet lies in bed daydreaming about Monsieur being gone as she has a vision of her husband appearing and disappearing from the bed beside her and then thinks of an image of a court house.
Madame Beudet has her first daydream just as the film begins. She slips into imagination of a calm, shimmering pond as she plays the piano (depicted in the upper right corner of the diagram above).
Early in the film, Madame Beudet has her second daydream in which she imagines driving a car through the clouds and being rescued from her misery by a tennis player. She is sitting in the chair that lies in the upper part of the room beside a small circular table (the chair appears in the diagram as a red rectangle and the table as a brown circle with a white circle on top) reading a magazine when she drifts into this daydream.
Another dream, introduced by an intertitle with the word “Obsession.”, that prompts the film’s climax takes place in this room. Madame Beudet is sitting in the same chair as when she has the tennis player and car daydream mentioned above. Behind her is the bookshelf, and she faces the window behind the desk as she imagines Monsieur Beudet slowly entering it before haunting her in various places around the room.
Ben Berke and Jacob Leflein