Belle de Jour

Luis Bunuel’s classic continues to enthral, beguile and dazzle audiences around the world to the present day. Starring the legendary Catherine Deneuve, this film remains one of her most renowned and lauded roles to date, no small trinket for an actress with more than 100 films to her name, who has worked with the esteemed likes of Truffaut, Demy, Polanski and Varda to name but a few.

Deneuve plays Séverine Serizy, a bourgeois housewife whose troublingly violent and erotic dreams betray a deeper sense of boredom with her life. A member of her social circle, Henri Husson (Philippe Noiret), gives her the address of a local brothel run by Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page). She takes up employment there and accumulates an array of clients under the pseudonym ‘belle de jour’, since she can only work in the afternoons to keep the secret from her husband Pierre (Jean Sorel). Soon Séverine finds herself entrapped in a world of perversity and passion from which escape appears impossible.

Bunuel’s surrealist background infects his film with a contradiction of meanings and images, which merge in a seemingly incoherent manner as if in a dream. Questions are asked of the spectator but never answered, as we are forced to set out like detectives in a quest to unravel the mystery of this woman’s actions. Perhaps there is no resolution, but the beauty of Bunuel’s film lies in this fantastic and outlandish journey we are privileged to take.