Belle de Jour ***** (1967, Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page, Pierre Clémenti) – Classic Movie Review 5658

Co-writer/ director Luis Buñuel and screen-writer Jean-Claude Carrière rework the novel by Joseph Kessel and deliver one of Buñuel’s undoubted masterwork movies in this sleek and provocative 1967 drama.

Catherine Deneuve is on dazzling form as Séverine Serizy, the beautiful but bored wife enjoying a sexless marriage with rich surgeon Pierre Serizy (Jean Sorel), who takes great pleasure in relishing her afternoons working as a prostitute in a bordello run by its stylish madam, Madame Anais (Geneviève Page).

The old Surrealist master director’s obsessions with sex, death, anti-clericalism and hypocrisy are laid out in glittering array with all the glee of a surgeon with a macabre sense of humour. The ice-cool, gorgeous young Deneuve gives a haunting performance, one of the finest in her long career. Pierre Clémenti is prominent as a seductive young criminal, Marcel.

It won the Golden Lion Best Film award at the Venice Film Festival in 1967. Its 1991 cinema revival confirmed its brilliance. It still excites and challenges. Only the trouser widths and hairstyles date this still ‘modern’ foreign classic. The newly restored film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

Also in the cast are Michel Piccoli, Francisco Rabal, Françoise Fabian, Maria Latour, Georges Marchal, Bernard Musson, Marcel Charvey and Macha Méril.

Pierre Clémenti was born on 28 September 1942 in Paris and died on 27 December 1999 of liver cancer. He is also known for The Leopard (1963) and Pigsty [Porcile] (1969).

Buñuel is best known for Un Chien Andalou (1929), The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

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