France,
1967, 101 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
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Luis Buñuel
- prod
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Henri Baum, Raymond Hakim, Robert Hakim
- scr
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Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière
- cam
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Sacha Vierny
- editor
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Louisette Hautecoeur
- cast
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Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clémenti, Françoise Fabian, Macha Méril
- source
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Miramax Films, 3800 W Alameda Room 979A, 9th floor, Burbank, CA 91505. EMAIL: scott.watts@miramax.com.
-
COMMENTS
Jean-Claude Carriére, recipient of the 2006 Kanbar Award, was interviewed onstage by David D’Arcy.
OTHER
Séverine (a radiant, ice-cold Catherine Deneuve) is the wife of a young doctor who has neglected both her and their marriage. Tired of her mundane bourgeois life, she takes a day job at a high-class brothel where she services a series of odd men with highly eccentric fetishes (including one with a coffin fixation). Séverine enjoys this double life until one of her customers becomes obsessed with her and wants to kill her husband, and she becomes torn between living as an abandoned housewife and as an upper-class prostitute. Although she tries to stop the murder, her efforts are curiously half-hearted. In this comic meditation on erotic obsession and ambiguity, Buñuel and screenwriter Carrière don't allow us to ever know for certain what is real and what (like Séverine's masochistic fantasies) is only imagined. They also delve deeply into the tension between middle-class values and the irrational forces that seethe underneath. With lush color cinematography by Sacha Vierny and couture by Yves Saint Laurent, Belle de Jour is as glamorous as it is perverse. The film suffered a strange fate after its initial release, with the producers mysteriously withdrawing it from circulation for decades. Finally, Miramax (with the help of Martin Scorsese) got the film out of limbo for restoration and release, allowing a new generation to discover this subversive erotic fantasy.
—Joel Shepard
FACTOID #1
The Festival has screened many debuts, both short- and feature-length, by some of cinema’s most influential artists including Juan Antonio Bardem, Jane Campion, Roman Polanski, Melvin Van Peebles and Lina Wertmüller.
