Belle de Jour (1967)

Masochistic daydreams become a reality in this erotic favorite from iconoclastic legend Luis Buñuel.

Directed by: Luis Buñuel

Cinematography by: Sacha Vierny

Country: France/Italy

Genre: Drama

A born taboo-breaker, Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel helped to establish surrealism - born out of Dadaism - as a legitimate art movement, and fledgling political movement (in France many surrealists allied with the communists for a brief period), along with André Breton and Salvador Dalí in the late 1920s.

Buñuel harbored a deep disdain for Spain’s fascist government and the corrupt Catholic Church, and used surrealism to insert hidden messages in his films to undermine the institutions. Similarly to the New Wave directors surrounding him during the release of Belle de Jour, Buñuel specialized in revolutionary, innovative, iconoclastic cinema - although he had been making subversive films while most of them were still in diapers. His themes blended elegance with perversity, stripping down bourgeois values and upper-class ideals, and dragging them back-and-forth through a rancid mud pit: he lived to upset convention and loved to offend traditional sensibilities: feats he accomplished through his masterful harnessing of the dream-state.

In Belle de Jour, a beautiful and wealthy, but bored, emotionally withdrawn, and sexually repressed Parisian housewife, with masochistic sexual fantasies, finds happiness and spiritual freedom when she begins working at a bordello during the daytime while her husband is at work.

Another facet that speaks to the reach and influence Buñuel had built over four decades: many of lead actress Catherine Deneuve’s costumes in the film were personally designed by the illustrious Yves Saint Laurent, who had launched his eponymous fashion empire six years earlier.

Distributed by: The Criterion Collection / Allied Artists Pictures / StudioCanal / Miramax