Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Belle de Jour 1967

Directed by Luis Buñuel

In Luis Buñuel’s surreal 60s classic, Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of her most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her after¬noon hours working in a bordello.

France In French with English subtitles
100 minutes DCP

Rent

Director

Producers

Robert Hakim
,
Raymond Hakim

Screenplay

Luis Buñuel
,
Jean-Claude Carrière. Based on the novel by Joseph Kessel

Photography

Sacha Vierney

Editor

Louisette Hautecoeur

Production designer

Robert Clavel

Costume designers

Hélène Nourry
,
Yves Saint Laurent

With

Catherine Deneuve (Séverine)
,
Jean Sorel (Pierre)
,
Michel Piccoli (Husson)
,
Geneviève Page (Anaïs)
,
Francisco Rabal (Hippolyte)
,
Pierre Clémenti (Marcel)
,
Françoise Fabian (Charlotte)
,
Maria Latour (Mathilde)
,
Francis Blanche (M. Adolphe)
,
Georges Marchal (the Duke)
,
François Maistre (the Professor)
,
Macha Méril (Renée)
,
Muni (Pallas)
,
Dominique Dandreiux (Catherine)
,
Bernard Musson (the thin man)
,
Brigitte Parmentier (Séverine as a child)

Festivals

Cannes (Classics)
,
Sydney 2017

Elsewhere

The unchallenged classic of elegant kink, wrought by the cinema’s great surrealist Luis Buñuel on the cool beauty of Catherine Deneuve, returns, direct from its 50th-birthday celebrations in Cannes in a stunning new 4K restoration.

“Catherine Deneuve is married to the handsomest, wealthiest young doctor in the land, but she can’t bear to have him touch her – instead, she spends her afternoons in a discreet Paris brothel, brusquely handled by gangsters, kinksters, and one Kalmyk with a magic box. Between workdays she dreams of even more humiliating encounters, starring her husband and different kinds of knots. The endless appeal of Belle de Jour, I won’t be the first to say, is its insistence on the fantasy and the reality; one doesn’t replace or resolve the other, just as cobbling together an origin story to explain our most singular obsessions cannot exorcise them. As Buñuel knew, a shoe is a shoe is a shoe – unless it’s so much more.”— Elina Mishuris, The L Magazine

“If, for us jaded children and grandchildren of the 60s, 40 years of bombardment by explicit sexual imagery has made that [original] impact unrecoverable, the undiminished power of the film resides more in the mesmeric audacity of Buñuel’s method. The productive friction – be it between the salacious material and the ‘chaste’ formality of how it’s observed; the ersatz ‘elegance’ of the salon and the perverse etiquettes of the Yves Saint Laurent-clothed, cigarette-chewing prostitutes and their clients; or the hallucinatory melding of fantasy and reality – still generates heat like a nuclear reactor.”— Wally Hammond, Time Out