Belle de jour: Tough Love
By January 17, 2012
“I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour.
- France
- 1967
- 100 minutes
- Color
- 1.66:1
- French
- Spine #593
SYNOPSIS: 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.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
| Séverine Serizy (Belle de jour) | Catherine Deneuve |
| Pierre Serizy | Jean Sorel |
| Henri Husson | Michel Piccoli |
| Madame Anaïs | Geneviéve Page |
| Marcel | Pierre Clémenti |
| Charlotte | Françoise Fabian |
| Renée | Macha Méril |
| Pallas | Muni |
| Mathilde | Maria Latour |
| Inspector | Claude Cerval |
| Footman | Michel Charrel |
| Hippolyte | Francisco Rabal |
| Duke | Georges Marchal |
| Monsieur Adolphe | Francis Blanche |
Credits
| Director | Luis Buñuel |
| From the novel by | Joseph Kessel |
| Adaptation and dialogue | Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière |
| Director of photography | Sacha Vierny |
| Production designer | Robert Clavel |
| Editor | Louisette Hautecœur |
| Sound | René Longuet |
| Costumes | Hélène Nourry |
| Producer | Raymond Hakim and Robert Hakim |
Disc Features
- New high-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- Audio commentary featuring Michael Wood, author of the BFI Film Classics book Belle de jour
- New video piece featuring writer and sexual-politics activist Susie Bright and film scholar Linda Williams
- New interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
- Segment from the French television program Cinéma, featuring interviews with Carrière and actress Catherine Deneuve
- Original and rerelease trailers
- New English subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Melissa Anderson and a 1970s interview with director Luis Buñuel
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Press Notes
Press Notes: Belle de jour
January 26, 2012
“One of the great French films of the 1960s, Belle de jour is a masterful blend of fantasy and reality,” writes Matt Hough in a Home Theater Forum review of Luis Buñuel’s sensual and cerebral classic, now on Criterion DVD and Blu-ray.
