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Contains strong sexual theme and fetish scenesA 40th anniversary re-release for the film that relauched Bu帽uel's career, providing him with his greatest commercial success. "I myself couldn't say what is real and what is imaginary in the film", commented the director, and therein lies Belle de Jour's abiding fascination, for it effortlessly blurs the boundaries between dream and 'reality', desire and action. A glacially beautiful Catherine Deneuve is at her most enigmatic in playing the frigid bourgeois wife Severine, who spends her afternoons working in an upmarket Parisian brothel.
Like Roman Polanski's Repulsion, made the previous year in London, Belle de Jour seeks to penetrate the ice-queen facade of its blonde star Deneuve. We begin by watching Severine's recurrent masochistic fantasy of travelling in a horse-drawn coach before being gagged and whipped by the servants. Elsewhere, she imagines being tied to a post and clad in a white dress and pelted with dung, and lying in a coffin for the pleasure of a necrophiliac Duke, and there are also eerily distanced performances, fleeting flashbacks to her childhood. "What are you thinking about?", asks her handsome but dull surgeon husband Pierre (Pierre Sorrel), yet thanks to the eerily distanced performance of the immaculately dressed and coiffured Deneuve, we can never be sure of what is going on in her inner life.
"MINES A VEIN OF DRY HUMOUR"
Other directors might have treated this material sensationally and salaciously. Working with cinematographer Sacha Vierney, B帽nuel however shoots Belle de Jour with calm discretion, mining a vein of dry humour in observing the characters' proclivities. So much here is unexplained and left to our imagination, even the buzzing contents of the giant Chinaman's lacquered box, which B帽nuel himself claimed was, "Whatever you want it to be."
