Belle de jour

Plot synopsis:
Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), is a 23 year old. beautiful, newlywed housewife, married to the respectable and uninteresting surgeon, Dr. Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel). Despite their love for each other, Séverine is frigid and sleeps in a separate bed, rejecting his sexual advances. Her sexual life is restricted to elaborate fantasies involving dominance and submission, sadomasochism, and bondage. Although frustrated by his wife's frigidity, he respects her wishes.While visiting a ski resort, they meet two friends, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli) and Renée (Macha Méril). Séverine does not like Husson's manner and the way he looks at her. Back in Paris, Séverine sees Renée again and learns that a mutual friend, Henriette, has turned to prostitution for money. At her home, Séverine receives roses from Husson and is unsettled by the gesture. At the tennis courts, she bumps into Husson and she asks him questions about Henriette and brothels. Husson mentions to Séverine the address of a high-class brothel at 11 Cité Jean de Saumur. He tells her he'd like to spend time with her -- without her husband being present -- but Séverine rejects his advances.Haunted by childhood memories involving her father, Séverine goes to address of the high-class brothel, leaves, and then enters, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page). Reluctant at first, she responds to the "firm hand" of Madame Anaïs, who names her "Belle de Jour," and has sex with her first john. After staying away for a week, incurring Madame Anaïs wrath, Séverine returns to the brothel and begins working everyday from two to five o'clock, returning to her unsuspecting husband each evening. One day Husson visits her at home, but Séverine refuses to see him, although she fantasizes about having sex with him in her husband's presence. Having sex as a prostitute allows her to begin enjoying sex with her husband.Husson discovers her secret one afternoon when he comes to the brothel for sex. Séverine at first demands he leave, then offers to have sex with him, but he says he was more attracted to her when he knew she was the wife of a "Boy Scout" and declines.A young gangster, Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), visits the brothel and requests Séverine's company. She's attracted by his rough, dangerous manner like that she seeks in her fantasies. Marcel sees her repeatedly and becomes increasingly jealous and demanding of her. When Séverine is gone for a week, vacationing with her husband, Marcel is upset. Séverine decides to leave the brothel and Madame Anaïs' agrees. After one of Marcel's gangster associates follows Séverine to her home, Marcel visits her and threatens to reveal her secret to her husband. Séverine pleads with him to leave, which he does, referring to her husband as "the obstacle."Marcel waits outside for Pierre to return home and shoots him three times. Marcel drives away, but has an auto accident and is killed by the police when he attempts to flee the scene and shoots at the officers. Séverine's husband survives but is left a paraplegic. The police are unable to find a motive for the attempted murder. Séverine takes care of Pierre at home, who is confined to a wheelchair. Husson visits and tells Séverine that he is going to tell Pierre about his wife's secret life. She offers no objection. Séverine fantasizes that her husband recovers and they are happy together.

Tags: pornographic, mystery, dramatic, cult, psychedelic, satire

Review:
The line that separates them is blurred so much that the famously mysterious ending has had critics arguing for decades over its meaning.The fantasy sequences are usually signalled by the sound of carriage bells, but by the end of the film the viewer is no longer able to differentiate between what is another one of Severine's fantasies and what is reality.
He said that "by the end, the real and imaginary fuse; for me they form the same thing." The gorgeous Catherine Deneuve, resplendent in her icy prime, portrays Severine Sevigny, the middle-class wife of Pierre, a doctor.
But this remark is not meant to simplify the story, its telling, or Deneuve's remarkable performance, which is what truly draws the viewer into the film."Belle de Jour" was Bunuel's first foray into the use of color, and he employed it to great effect.
The viewer is however drawn into the sense of feeling to be a voyeur into Severine's secret life; the careful choreography of scenes and camera angles contribute to the uncomfortable sense of intrusion by us, the viewers.There are many sub-stories and small mysteries in the film; for instance one of the most widely debated upon by critics is the mystery of "what is in the Asian client's little box?" that he presents first to one prostitute, who quickly refuses, then to Severine, who tentatively agrees.
All the audience know is that it's something with a insect-like noise, and when the client leaves, Severine is sprawled face-down upon the bed, the sheets thrown about, and obviously pleased with whatever took place in the interim."Belle de Jour" was awarded the Golden Lion at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, as well as the award for Best Foreign Film in 1968 from the New York Film Critics Circle.Interesting side notes: Bunuel himself had a shoe fetish, which helps explain the numerous shots of Deneuve's beautifully clad feet throughout the film, and the fact that every time she goes shopping, she buys shoes.
Her sexuality is awakened by the sometimes brutish clients, who soon discover that "she likes it rough," and she is ultimately caught up a relationship with a truly dangerous client (Pierre Clémenti) whose possessiveness threatens to destroy both her and her husband.Throughout the film Deneuve slips in and out of memory and fantasy, sometimes recalling herself as a possibly molested child, sometimes imagining herself as the victim in a series of sexual assault fantasies.
Director Bunuel, whose masterpiece this is, so blurs the line between memory, reality, and fantasy that by the film's conclusion one cannot be sure if some, most, or everything about the film has been Deneuve's fantasy.Although it includes a number of impressive performances (particularly by Geneviève Page, her girls, and their clients), BELLE is essentially Deneuve's film from start to finish, and she gives an astonishing performance that cannot be easily described.
Bunuel presents both her and the film as a whole in an almost clinical manner, and is less interested in gaining our sympathy for the character than in presenting her as an object for intellectual observation.Ultimately, BELLE DU JOUR seems to be about a lot of things, some of them obvious and some of them extremely subtle.
Catherine Deneuve is perfectly cast as an upper-class Parisian housewife who decides to spend her afternoons working in a brothel in Luis Bunuel's subversive masterpiece which proves that intimation can be just as effective as exploitation.
'Belle de Jour' is Buñuel at his weirdest: the Spanish master builds this movie on the relationship between the fantasy of conscious and unconscious dreams and reality.
This is what's fun in Buñuel's movie: it's impossible to tell fiction from fact.Séverine is the heart and soul of 'Belle de Jour:' her journey through her own sexuality is riveting; she starts with as a repressed woman who's having marital problems, probably due to sex.
She ponders leaving the brothel until a new client, arrives and she's immediately attracted to him.Pierre Cleménti was an outstanding revelation: although I had unknowingly seen him once before in Bertolucci's 'The Comformist' as the homosexual driver Lino, I certainly noticed him in this movie: he's a fascinating combination of style and substance with his amazing performance, playing the sophisticated, leather-wearing, cane-wielding, gold-toothed young criminal, Marcel, meeting Séverine when celebrating a successful bank heist.
She eventually adopts a double life on weekday afternoons as a hooker Here she explores the depths of her desires with her amazing sexual inhibitions Although the film resolves around her goings-on at a high-class brothel, real nudity and sex are never shown "Belle de Jour" may seem one of the most mysterious, poetic, and provoking films ever made Producing a body of work unparalleled in its wealth of meaning and its ability to surprise and shock, Buñuel leads us into a new world arousing wonder and astonishment, depravity and pleasure, weird and entertaining.
Even if you don't give a tinker's melted watch about surrealism, and don't care to puzzle out reality from fantasy, there's still much to like here: frequent droll humor, a little bit of titillation, and a good performance from an incredibly beautiful young Catherine Deneuve.
Luis Bunuel's Masterpiece of Erotica in which deals with a frigid young housewife , a virginal newlywed named Severine (Catherine Deneuve) married to a prestigious surgeon called Pierre (Jean Sorel) .
Pretty good support cast gives fine acting ; it is mostly formed by nice French actors such as Michel Piccoli as Henri Husson , Geneviève Page as Madame Anais , Pierre Clémenti s Marcel , Françoise Fabian as Charlotte , Macha Méril as Renee and special mention to Spanish Francisco Rabal who played various Buñuel films such as Nazarin and Viridiana .
No. It wouldn't.Believe me - Belle de Jour's story about a frigid, empty-headed woman's walk-on-the-wild-side certainly had some promising potential - But, when put into the incompetent hands of that over-rated, hack-director, Luis Bunuel - It was the driest, most antiseptic look at whoredom that you could ever imagine possible.And, speaking about the gorgeous, 24-year-old actress, Catherine Deneuve as the Severine/Belle de Jour character - (Me-oh-my!) - If only this vacuous beauty could have acted even half a good as she looked, then, yes, this agonizingly dismal picture might have actually been elevated into something worth tolerating..
the fact is, that "Belle de Jour", written by the same Buñuel and Jean-Calude Carrière (Who works too in "La Voie Lactee" and "Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie", is,as rare, an excellent surrealistic masterpiece where you can think and feel what you want.
The adaptation of the novel written by Joseph Kessel, Belle de Jour, is perhaps the most successful production made by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel (won the Golden Lion for best film in the 1967's version of the Venice Film Festival), in which the brilliant Buñuel shows the dark and singular fusion between the eroticism and the bourgeoisie society, recurrent subjects in his acclaimed filmography, framed in a surrealist context and the exploration of deep desires but of the human being.This film narrates the life of Séverine Serezy, interpreted by the beautiful Catherine Deneuve, in one of its best performances, the roll of a frigid woman married to a prestigious surgeon, interpreted by Jean Sorel.
An existing scope where Séverine shows herself without emotion, almost hieratic; the typical wife subjugated to a perfect life, a bourgeois life that hits her true essence, that annihilates her intimacy.The other world, the scope of the imagination, the one of its desires, collides with the external one, triggering the argument plot of the script where by flash backs we discovered the traumatic childhood of Séverine: raped and punished by the society, releasing in her feelings of guilt and the fantasies generated by her inner desire.In the meantime Buñuel is playing with the plot, exposing a Séverine disturbed by the fault, and simultaneously hypnotized by the sensuality that manages to reach when becoming a prostitute, in a masochist woman, no longer subjugated by the society, if not, by the clients which frequent the brothel of Madame Anais, interpreted by Geneviève Page; Séverine is even allowed to be whipped, to be raped, to imagine what it is like to be fornicate by one of her husband's friends.Sequences full of symbolic objects, scenes full of dreams and a surrealism that is never lost in the work of Buñuel, reveals a production packed of cold characters that is colorful non single as well, by its luminous interiors or the elegant and chic clothes created by the very same Yves Saint-Laurent for Catherine Deneuve and shoes by the legendary Roger Vivier, but by a clean and fascinating eroticism that anticipates the work of directors like David Lynch and François Ozon..
The always provocative Luis Buñuel directed (and co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière) this adaptation of Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel, about the beautiful, apparently frigid 23 year-old wife (Catherine Deneuve) of a surgeon (Jean Sorel) who decides to live her fantasies at a brothel in the afternoons.Here, as in several of his films, Buñuel makes a sharp, often disturbing, sometimes darkly funny, and always provocative meditation on the lifelessness of the French bourgeoisie, focusing on the boredom and private rebellion of a young woman so absorbed in her own fantasies that we don't know if what we are seeing is actually happening or only taking place in Severine's mind.
Not a single frame of Belle de Jour is filled with nudity yet everything is given a sexual dimension from the quiet demurs of a housewife's diligent sewing to the firm coaxing of Severine's madam (Page).The film in its initial run was no doubt helped at the box office by the presence of Catherine Deneuve, whose performance in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and followup work in The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) have made her an international star.
The cinematography felt cheap, and not in the way a hip artist might take advantage of.At the end of the day, I think Luis Bunuel had a great story in mind, but was not able to manifest the story into a living, breathing, and beautiful film.
Catherine DeNeuve as (Severine / Belle De Jour) gives a fine and a subdued performance, but after a point she start becoming monotonous as she does the same thing over and over again.This is French cinema, so there is some inexplicably that will made me , a viewer think about it and here I have her dreams that come and go just like that.
A hypnotic blend of fantasy and reality, Belle De Jour is the first film I've seen from Luis Buñuel and it certainly won't be the last.
Deneuve, ever alluring and catching of the eyes, walks through her life as a woman in a trance, stuck between her lurid fantasies and her more traditional reality, and Buñuel places the audience in this same spell.Severine is a mysterious character, one who dreams of being sexually humiliated and violated, yet for some reason she remains sterile within her own marriage, despite her husband's numerous efforts.
Catherine Deneuve plays an unfulfilled Parisian housewife who decides to take a daytime job as a prostitute.The movie contains two interesting dichotomies: on the one hand, it's never totally clear what's real and what's Severine's imagination (the scenes where she gets whipped and raped look like her imagination).
French-Italy co-production, directed with tricky élan by Luis Buñuel, has Catherine Deneuve playing another frigid beauty, this one a wealthy doctor's wife who can't seem to get her married life off the ground (after one year of marriage, she and her husband still sleep in separate beds).
For people who find pleasure in sexual kinks but aren't quite comfortable with their appetites, Luis Bunuel's 1967 classic ''Belle de Jour'' is the ultimate candy, offered in a manner that's elegant and nonjudgmental.Starring a ravishing, letter-perfect Catherine Deneuve as Severine, a bored Parisian housewife who dabbles in prostitution, ''Belle de Jour'' is a wise, enormously enjoyable film about the power of fantasy: a toast to the importance of dreams.Directing with cool, wicked detachment, Bunuel strips bare Deneuve's rich fantasy life and in brief flashbacks psychologizes Severine's taste for kink.
The sexual fantasy part did not mean as much to me in 2005 as it might have in the 1960's, but the idea of middle-classed conformity encouraging dangerous behavior as an escape from a robotic existence struck an important chord when I look around.The scene with the super rich guy putting the conventional middle classed woman in a coffin, then doing only God knows what to her, and subsequently having her thrown out of his château in the rain by a servant in disguising black glasses was, in my opinion, a revealing and intelligent reference to the way average, proper, and conventional people are habitually manipulated, exploited and then discarded by those in "society" who are, and always have been, "above the rules" that bourgeoisie, like Severine and her husband are still taught to live by.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)This psychodrama seems a little dated viewed today, and would be an ordinary film except for the fact that it stars the legendary French beauty Catherine Deneuve and is directed by the incomparable Spaniard Luis Buñuel, although this is not his best work.
This meeting between Luis Bunuel - the great Spanish director close to the end of a career started as a partner of Dali in making the surrealist 'Chien Andalou' and ended as the creator of some of the best films about the morals of the bourgeoisie - and Catherine Deneuve, one of the best and most beautiful French actresses at the start of a fabulous career is really explosive.
Engaging in a variety of fetish acts and fantasies she begins to become more intimate with her husband but an underworld client (Pierre Clementi) becomes infatuated and threatens to fracture things.Director Luis Bunuel has a field day lurching the viewer between fantasy and reality with the ice queen beauty and presence of Deneuve as our guide through a luridly erotic, threatening and comic world of kink.
Catherine Deneuve is perfectly cast as a frigid, rich, bored wife who decides to explore her carnal urges by sidelining as a prostitute in this deceptively straight forward film by Luis Bunuel.Deneuve plays Severine, who loves her husband but can't open herself to him sexually.
But Severine is an unreliable narrator, and in typical Bunuel style, the film blends fantasy with reality to the point where we don't know where one ends and the other begins.
The film epitomises the artistic style of Bunuel and is a treat to watch.Last but by no means least, I have got to talk about Catherine Deneuve.
Finally viewed the international classic "Belle De Jour" with legendary screen queen Catherine Deneuve and for a film of 1967 it was one of lust and erotic fantasy to it's best!
Luis Buñuel, probably the king of surrealist films, opens Belle de Jour, his first color film, with a couple of lingering shots and minimal sound which makes me feel like I was thrown in a different world or staring at beautiful paintings - which rightly sets the mood for 100 minutes of pure surreal movie experience.On the film's technical aspects, there is no background music except for the all-important bird/bell sounds; and the cinematography & lighting are not as visually satisfying as other films i've seen.
The surrealistic management of time and places are all but a simple exercise in Belle de Jour, and that's when you understand what it means to be open-minded while you're watching a real piece of Seventh Art. Do not hesitate in watching and re-watching this movie, a production made back when art really meant something to film directors and to the public.
This is all due to the unusual fantasies and the wishes of the customers the Catherine Deneuve character hooks up with, when she starts working as a part-time prostitute.The movie handles all of its themes very well and interesting, which gets you into the mind of the main character and understand her dilemmas and motivations.
First seeing Luis Bunuel's film here, there are a few surreal aspects to it, but the premise really is a young attractive wife of a doctor, who lives in Paris but is bored with her existence and has intimacy issues with her husband.It is very odd at first as we see her visiting with her husband Pierre's friends, at parties, etc...but really her mind is elsewhere, she wants a form of appreciation, obsession, perhaps lust or love.
Deneuve as Severine is beautiful here, her pale blonde hair, demure, and sensual.After awhile she is intrigued and Madame Anais makes up her alias "belle du jour", she works during the day, and encounters some very odd characters.
Belle de Jour (1967) *** 1/2 (out of 4) A beautiful woman (Catherine Deneuve) marries a doctor but can't be intimate with him so she starts working during the day as a prostitute.
Either way one thinks, he/she is in for a ride of reality and fantasy melding together, eventually becoming one and the same, where at the finish of the film no one will know what actually happened, if anything at all.Our lead is played magically by Catherine Deneuve who's striking in beauty as well as dramatic chops.
The line between illusion and reality is blurred to perfection in all of Luis Bunuel's work but perhaps most seamlessly in "Belle de Jour," his best known (if not his best) movie.
Belle De Jour, has good direction, a good script, a good performance by Catherine Deneuve (who plays Severine), good cinematography and good film editing.
Belle!Beautiful.luis Bunuel?surrealistic movie for a realistic sexual life..
The young wife Severine (Catherine Deneuve) of a Paris doctor can't be intimate with her husband and becomes a day prostitute at a supposedly high class Parisian brothel.