The Criterion Collection

Catherine Deneuve did not enjoy making Belle de jour. In 2004, she told an interviewer, “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to . . . There were moments when I felt totally used.”

The name of Deneuve’s character, Séverine, is a femininization of the name of the male protagonist of Baron von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Severin. As the literary origin of the term masochism, Sacher-Masoch, along with his 1870 novel, no doubt presented an irresistible reference point for Joseph Kessel, the author of the 1928 novel Belle de jour, on which the film is based.

The coach and footmen fantasy originated in Pierre Louÿs’s novel La femme et le pantin, which director Luis Buñuel would draw on again for That Obscure Object of Desire.

This shot of Jean Sorrel and Michel Piccoli in the expiation/remorse fantasy is explicitly based on the mid-nineteenth-century painting Angelus, by Jean-François Millet.

Buñuel has a cameo in the film, as one of the customers (seated, looking up at Georges Marchal) in the café where Séverine meets the duke.

In this film that features suggestions of necrophilia, incest, and scatology, the censors saw fit to cut only one shot: that of this sixteenth-century painting by Matthias Grünewald. Although Buñuel liked the image, he didn’t fight the cut, because, as producers Robert and Raymond Hakim told him, “by letting the censors cut one thing, you keep them from cutting even more.”

Kessel’s novel, despite being routinely derided by both Buñuel and scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, is actually quite good, and most of the nonfantasy elements of the film’s plot hew pretty closely to it. Kessel also wrote the novel Army of Shadows, on which Jean-Pierre Melville’s film is based.

Buñuel changed the nationality of the character Hippolyte from the Syrian of the novel to Spanish, simply so that he could have Francisco Rabal sing a little flamenco.

Piccoli, having played the very Sadean Henri Husson in Belle de jour, went on to play the Marquis de Sade himself for Buñuel two years later, in The Milky Way.

The most out-of-left-field thing I learned while working on this release: writer and activist Susie Bright, whom I interviewed for one of the supplements, was the real-life basis for the character of Alyssa in Chasing Amy.

Issa Clubb is a producer at the Criterion Collection.