Belle de Jour
An erotic, surreal and provocative film by Luis Buñuel, starring Catherine Deneuve in one of the most daring roles of her career. She plays a housewife who decides to start working in a brothel.
Deneuve is seen in the role of Séverine, a young Parisian doctor’s wife whose porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior. She decides to break with the decency rules of her wealthy class and secretly starts working as a sex worker. An acquaintance, Henri, discovers her secret. His manipulation leads to a game of attraction and repulsion.
Belle De Jour offers an absurdist critique of the social mores and class divisions of the 1960s. Buñuel saw film as the medium to express the subconscious. He does so in Freudian surrealist dream sequences, in which fantasy, power and sexuality play an important role. Over and over again, he raises questions which he teasingly leaves unanswered. For instance, what is in the music box used by a Japanese man to make his desires known? And is Séverine’s husband informed of her shady activities or not? Questions that continue to tickle the fancy even after the film has ended. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.