Rent Belle De Jour
(1967)
Belle de jour
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Undoubtly Luis Bunuel's most accessibly 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 40 years ago. Screen icon Catherine Deneuve plays Severine, the glacially beautiful, sexually unfulfilled wife of a surgeon, whose blood runs cold with ennui until she takes a day-job in a brothel. There she meets a charismatic but sinister young gangster (Pierre Clementi), and ignites an obsession that will court peril. Expertly dramatizing the collision between fantasy and reality, and between depravity and respectable bourgeois values, Bunuel, working from the novel by Joseph Kessel, fashions an immaculately designed (the fetishistic interiors and production designs are astonishing) and amoral comedy of manners.
Recent Reviews of Belle De Jour by our members
Belle De Jour review by The Lesser Merlin
Disappointing
(0) of (0) members found this review helpful.
I missed this one 40 years ago and wish I had again. It might have been good once but it looks tired and fake in 2010. The acting is wooden (even Deneuve) and the direction rigid. I saw no "erotic masterpiece", no "collision between fantasy and reality" (they are nearly indistiguishably drear) and no "depravity" (even by the emerging standards of 1967).
Have I missed the point? I don't think so. It claims to be one of the first cinematic explorations of female sexual fantasies and I guess is intentionally dispassionate, but sexual fantasies are about biology, psychology and above all else, feelings - none of which are portrayed here.
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Belle De Jour review by Kurtz
Whose fantasy??
(0) of (1) members found this review helpful.
This was Luis Bunuel’s biggest commercial success, and it is still a highly regarded movie today- an eminent film historian provides the talk-track as one of the extras on the DVD. It is undeniably stylish and succeeds in creating a powerfully erotic atmosphere without actually revealing very much bare flesh- there are a few shots of Catherine Deneuve in her faintly scary sixties lingerie, but most of the frisson comes from the internal fantasy sequences where she imagines a life far removed the rather chaste and sterile world she inhabits with her husband. It was these sequences that Bunuel invented, grafting them on to material from the original novel to explain how Deneuve’s upper-middle class Severine ends up working in a brothel. Bunuel’s assistants tell in interviews how they did extensive research into female sexual fantasy (tough job, but someone’s got to do it!), but I’m unconvinced about how many women would actually get that hot under the bodice about being pelted with cow dung and whipped and ravished by randy coachmen. Maybe it was more a question of male fantasy, Sr. Bunuel? Throughout it all, though, Deneuve’s icy, mask-like impassivity reveals nothing either way.
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Rated: 3.3 stars out of 5 from 73 ratings
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BFI Classification:
Suitable only for persons of 18 years and over
| Release Date: | 22/01/2007 |
| Production Year: | 1967 |
| Run Time: | 96 minutes |
| Aspect Ratio: | Widescreen 1.78:1 / 16:9 |
| Format: | Pal |
| Colour: | Colour |
Special Features:
- 'History of a Film' 30 minute documentary
- Exclusive commentary from Professor Peter W. Evans
- Original Theatrical Trailer
