Films francais
     
 
Belle de jour
1967 Fantasy / Drama
 
Credits
  • Director: Luis Buñuel
  • Script: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel
  • Photo: Sacha Vierny
  • Cast: Catherine Deneuve (Séverine Serizy aka Belle de Jour), Jean Sorel (Pierre Serizy), Michel Piccoli (Henri Husson), Geneviève Page (Madame Anais), Pierre Clémenti (Marcel), Françoise Fabian (Charlotte), Macha Méril (Renee), Muni (Pallas), Maria Latour (Mathilde), Georges Marchal (Duke), Francis Blanche (Monsieur Adolphe)
  • Country: France
  • Language: French
  • Runtime: 101 min
  • Aka: Beautiful of the Day; Belle de jour
 
 
 
Summary
Severine is a young middle-class woman in a happy, but appartently unconsummated, marriage.  Taunted by sado-masochistic fantasies, she becomes a daytime prostitute, and soon falls in love with one of her clients, a violent gangster type.   The story ends with a paradox: which were the fantasies and which were the real events?

Review
This is a very unusual  film, where the director Luis Bunuel plays intriguing games with one's notions of normal convention and fantasy.  As the film progresses and the viewer is persuaded to accept increasingly unlikely events as reality, the distinction between fantasy and reality is ultimately merged.  In the end the viewer is forced to ask a disturbing question.   Can those awful sado-masochistic dreams of Severine's be real events...?

As a satire of middle-class hypocrisy it works quite well, although it is clearly too complex to be just that.  It is arguably Catherine Deneuve's finest performance on screen, and her scenes with Michel Piccoli have an almost electric quality to them (again, reinforcing the view that the apparant fantasies are real events).

© James Travers 1999

See also:
The life of Luis Buñuel
Un chien Andalou
L'Age d'or
Viridiana
El Angel exterminador
Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie
French fantasy films


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