Belle de jour
1967 Fantasy / Drama
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Credits
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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
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