Belle de Jour

Catherine Deneuve’s porcelain perfection hides a cracked interior in one of the actress’s most iconic roles: Séverine, a Paris housewife who begins secretly spending her afternoon hours working in a bordello. This surreal and erotic late-sixties daydream from provocateur for the ages Luis Buñuel is an examination of desire and fetishistic pleasure (its characters’ and its viewers’), as well as a gently absurdist take on contemporary social mores and class divisions. Fantasy and reality commingle in this burst of cinematic transgression, which was one of Buñuel’s biggest hits.

Duration: 100
Production year: 1967
Country: France, Italy

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Luis Buñuel

Born in Spain, in 1900. Luís Buñuel was a leading figure in Surrealism. An atheist and communist sympathizer who was preoccupied with themes of gratuitous cruelty, eroticism, and religious mania.
In 1917, he entered the Residencia de Estudiantes cultural institution in Madrid, where he met Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. In 1924, he moved to Paris and worked as an assistant to the filmmaker Jean Epstein. In 1929, he released his first film, Un chien Andalou, with a screenplay by Dalí. In Mexico, he shot The forgotten (1947), which won him his first prize for best director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. In 1961, he returned to Spain and began filming Viridiana, which won him the Palme d'Or in Cannes. In 1967, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice film Festival for Belle de Jour. He died in Mexico in 1983.