Belle de Jour

Director: Luis Buñuel (1967)

Undoubtedly Luis Buñuel's most accessible 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.

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 Clémenti) and ignites an obsession that will court peril.

Expertly dramatising the collision between fantasy and reality, and between depravity and respectable bourgeois values, Buñel, working from the novel by Joseph Kessel, fashions an immaculately designed and amoral comedy of manners.  Long unavailable, the film won the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival.

Cert. 18

Run time: 1 hour 36 minutes

French with subtitles.