Amazon.com Essentials:
A young Paris housewife, Séverine, grows bored with her
stable husband. When she learns of the presence of a high-class
brothel in her neighborhood, she quietly goes to work there--but only
during the day, until five o'clock in the afternoon. This sublime 1967
film is one of the latter-day masterpieces of the Spanish-born
director Luis Buñuel, whose career forms one of the greatest
and boldest arcs in cinema. By the time of Belle de Jour,
Buñuel had become almost completely deadpan in his style, which
not only leaves the motivation of Séverine a mystery (despite a
few flashbacks to degradations of her youth), but also casts the
entire plot in doubt. An old surrealist from the 1920s (when his first
classic, Un Chien
Andalou, was made in collaboration with Salvador Dali),
Buñuel suggests that what we see may be real, or simply
Séverine's imagination. Because he was the least pretentious of
directors, Buñuel keeps his material playful, wicked, yet
cutting. As Séverine, the impossibly lovely Catherine Deneuve
uses her cool demeanor to great effect--she never breaks her deadpan,
either. In 1995, after having been out of official circulation for
years, Belle de Jour was re-released in America and became an
unexpected art-house hit. --Robert Horton
