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BELLE DE JOUR
1967
Director
Luis Buñuel
Starring
Catherine Deneuve
Jean Sorel
Michel Piccoli
Runtime
101 minutes
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Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her afternoon hours working in a bordello. This surreal and erotic late-sixties daydream from provocateur for the ages Luis Buñuel is an examination of desire and fetishistic pleasure (its characters’ and its viewers’), as well as a gently absurdist take on contemporary social mores and class divisions. Fantasy and reality commingle in the unforgettable burst of cinematic transgression that is BELLE DE JOUR.
"Haunting, amusing, provocative, teasing, and elegant in its puzzle-like ambiguities." - Jonathan Rosenbaum
"A coolly outrageous masterpiece. As flawless as its star, the movie is founded on the great surrealist’s genius for free-associative chitchat and orchestrated Freudian slips, right down to its teasingly open ending." - J. Hoberman
"Though Deneuve deferred to her director, she was no puppet; BELLE DE JOUR is as much hers as Buñuel’s. The filmmaker, famously resistant to 'psychological' interpretations of his work, stuffs BELLE DE JOUR with his trademarks, confounding any attempt to parse meaning: the surrealist blurring of fantasy and reality, fetishism, sexual perversion, blasphemy. But as Séverine, Deneuve, despite operating in the nebulous realm between dream and waking, imbues the film with irresistible and very real lust—and luster." - Melissa Anderson
"Haunting, amusing, provocative, teasing, and elegant in its puzzle-like ambiguities." - Jonathan Rosenbaum
"A coolly outrageous masterpiece. As flawless as its star, the movie is founded on the great surrealist’s genius for free-associative chitchat and orchestrated Freudian slips, right down to its teasingly open ending." - J. Hoberman
"Though Deneuve deferred to her director, she was no puppet; BELLE DE JOUR is as much hers as Buñuel’s. The filmmaker, famously resistant to 'psychological' interpretations of his work, stuffs BELLE DE JOUR with his trademarks, confounding any attempt to parse meaning: the surrealist blurring of fantasy and reality, fetishism, sexual perversion, blasphemy. But as Séverine, Deneuve, despite operating in the nebulous realm between dream and waking, imbues the film with irresistible and very real lust—and luster." - Melissa Anderson