Luis Buñuel-Belle de jour (1967)

An exquisite tale of self-discovery and tragic passion, Luis Bunuel's Golden Lion Award-winning drama chronicles a French housewife's awakening passions as she spends her days living out her fantasies in a brothel and her nights in the arms of her loving husband. Based on Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, this acclaimed film had been unseen in the U.S. since the 1970's. (Optimum Releasing)




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 as it did on its debut 30 years ago.Screen icon Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs icy with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clémenti), and ignites an obsession that will court peril. (Optimum Releasing)




Expertly dramatising the collision between fantasy and reality, and between depravity and respectable bourgeois values, Buñuel, working from the novel by Joseph Kessel, fashions an immaculately designed (the fetishistic interiors and production designs are astonishing) and amoral comedy of manners. Long unavailable, the film won the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival. (Optimum Releasing)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0061395/plotsummary)




Severine Serizy, happily married to a handsome young surgeon, goes to work in a house of ill repute, actually an intimate apartment. The money involved is less the motivation than the pretext for her action. Pierre, her husband, provides for her material needs handsomely, but his respectfully temporizing caresses fail to satisfy her psychic need for brutal degradation, a need first awakened by a child molester when she was eight. To preserve a facade of marital respectability, Severine works at her obsessive profession only afternoons from two to five, the mystery of her matinée schedule causing her to be christened Belle de jour. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0061395/plotsummary)




Widely acclaimed as a motion picture masterpiece, BELLE DE JOUR is an erotically charged tale of deceit and desire! Beautiful Catherine Deneuve stars as Severine, a perfect young housewife … who leads a shocking double life. What her loving husband Pierre doesn't know is that by day she's a high-priced prostitute! But when the dangerous obsession of a customer forces her terrible secrets out into the open, Pierre must decide whether to reject her for what she has done … or accept her for who she is! The stunning erotic intrigue of BELLE DE JOUR will both captivate and entertain!




A young Paris housewife, Séverine, grows bored with her stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to wor there–but only during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967 film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born director Luis Buñuel, whose career forms one of the greatest and boldest arcs in cinema. (Amazon.com - Editorial Reviews -Robert Horton)




By the time of Belle de jour, Buñuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which not only leaves the motivation of Séverine a mystery (despite a few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first classic, Un chien andalou, was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali), Buñuel suggests that what we see may be real, or simply Séverine's imagination. Because he was the least pretentious of directors, Buñuel keeps his material playful, wicked, yet cutting.




As Séverine, the impossibly lovely Catherine Deneuve uses her cool demeanor to great effect–she never breaks her deadpan, either. In 1995, after having been out of official circulation for years, Belle de Jour was re-released in America and became an unexpected art-house hit.