Opening shot

Provost says that, as a man, his life's meaning is driven by "the mystery of the woman". He wants the opening "Courbet shot" to suggest that the film's story comes out of the woman's vagina (remember Courbet's painting is called "The Origin of the World") and it also forms the protagonist's unattainable goal throughout the film/his life.

Provost also says that the entire opening shot can be seen as some sort of commercial ad for Europe: a depiction of a carefree and prosperous world where modern, liberated women play the main role.

If that all sounds far-fetched, it's very standard Freudian/Lacanian stuff. It's quite cliché but Freud's famous quote is of course that the one question he couldn't answer in his life was: "Was will das Weib?" And Lacan actually used to own that very Courbet painting and kept it privately and covered up. So Provost seems to share that obsession.

I like it how the opening shot forms some sort of mythological "genesis" of the film's narrative; it's the set-up that, via the tunnel sequence that follows it (which is also part of the narrative: the protagonist travels from the Spanish shore to the city of Brussels), brings us to the "actual" beginning of the film, where the protagonist has ended up as an illegal construction worker. That's the point where the film starts "rolling"; what happened before fades away like a sort of dream.