Belle de Jour
M O V I E   R E V I E W

All images © Studiocanal.

Belle de Jour
1967
(January 2017 - back in stock with booklet and postcard)
© Studiocanal

Details

Undoubtedly Luis Buñuel’s most accessible film, Belle de Jour is an elegant and erotic masterpiece that maintains as hypnotic a grip on modern audiences today as it did on its debut over 40 years ago.

Severine is a beautiful young woman married to a doctor. She loves her husband dearly, but cannot bring herself to be physically intimate with him. She indulges instead in vivid, kinky, erotic fantasies to entertain her sexual desires. Eventually she becomes a prostitute, working in a brothel in the afternoons while remaining chaste in her marriage.

Stars the incomparable Catherine Deneuve in a career defining role as Severine, the eponymous heroine of the film.

Notes

The following are a couple of short extracts from the informative 16 page booklet that accompanies the Dvd. It contains the articles The Films of Luis Buñuel & Catherine Deneuve: From Ice Maiden to Living Divinity. Also includes a Luis Buñuel Filmography. Text © Studiocanal

...the opening minutes of Belle de Jour (1967). The camera is stationed at the end of a long, bare road stretching toward a distant country house. There is an eerie absence of music on the soundtrack: all we hear is the jangle of bells as a horse-drawn carriage trundles toward us. When the camera does switch position and begin to move, it is in a kamikaze tracking shot into the path of the oncoming carriage. The jolt we receive from that shot ripples through the stilted exchange between the passengers - the withdrawn Severine (Catherine Deneuve) and her husband, Pierre (Jean Sorel). He has a complaint: his wife is too cold, too unkind. Well, you want to remind him, she is Catherine Deneuve; she gives good ice...

...When casting this twisted adaptation of Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, about a dazed housewife who whiles away her afternoons working in a brothel, Buñuel felt pressured into hiring Deneuve by the actress's then lover, Francois Truffaut, who wrote him letters recommending her. Thank goodness, then, for Truffaut: it's hard to imagine Belle de Jour without Deneuve's enigmatic portrayal of Severine. "Don't do anything," advised Bunuel, who was famously frugal with his direction. "And above all, don't...perform." And she doesn't. In fact, she elevates the non-performance into a new art form.