Product Description

Widely acclaimed as a motion picture masterpiece, BELLE DE JOUR is an erotically charged tale of deceit and desire! Beautiful Catherine Deneuve (INDOCHINE) stars as Severine, a perfect young housewife ... who leads a shocking double life. What her loving husband Pierre doesn't know is that by day she's a high-priced prostitute! But when the dangerous obsession of a customer forces her terrible secrets out into the open, Pierre must decide whether to reject her for what she has done ... or accept her for who she is! Now available on video for the first time, the stunning erotic intrigue of BELLE DE JOUR will both captivate and entertain!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7965 in DVD
• Released on: 2002-01-22
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 102 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
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

Customer Reviews

Belle de Jour
I agree with Wing J. Flanagan's review; there is nothing wrong with this DVD. Buy it!

When shall I receive it????
I ordered the item, paid by credit card and still haven't received it. What's going on? Have I done something wrong?

An unbalance look at female sexual perversion.
Belle de Jour most definitely belongs to the realm of cinematic classics. It is arguably the most accessible of Bunuel's films and probably the best introduction to his work because it did for me.

Séverine (Deneuve) has everything a young middle class woman is supposed to want. She has a handsome, caring doctor for a husband named Pierre (Sorel), a beautiful home, and plenty of fashionable clothing. But she is not happy. Her bland spouse treats her like a child, so she indulges in dark brutal fantasies filled with guilt, passion, and pain. Already inclined to sadomasochistic fantasies due to some unknown trauma in her past, Severine is increasingly drawn to acting upon her need for degradation. Bored with her life, she works during the afternoons at a brothel which caters to this proclivity, yet she is still the good bourgeois wife who informs her madam that she has to be home by five p.m. (her alias at the brothel is Belle de Jour, a pun on the French euphemism for prostitute, "belle de nuit"). She enjoys this double life until one of her customers, a gangster, becomes so obsessed with her to the point that he is determined to kill her husband. What follows next is a meditation on ambiguity on all levels. Severine is morally torn between living as an upper-class ice maiden and an abandoned fantasy woman. Although Severine is trying to stop her husband's murder, her efforts seem to be somewhat half-hearted, almost as if she is willing to tempt fate.

Thanks to Sacha Vierny's stunning color cinematography, Yves Saint Laurent's couture and her own genes, Deneuve herself looks beautiful that even she seems unreal an indication of how beautiful Deneuve is in this film can be found by recalling Grace Kelly in her Hitchcock period. Finally, the narrative structure is strained by events to the point where the audience cannot be certain whether anything recounted in the course of the film belongs to the realm of the physical or the psychological -- not unlike life itself, at times.

Towards the end of this film you'll come to fine out that Severine likes molestation. That is the heart of her perversity and the film's. It absolutely refuses to help us be good bourgeois. Bunuel's naturalistic style was subversive and sadistic. Its pitiless anti-aestheticism means you watch without painkillers. No ambivalence, no softening, no way out. Either you respond from your own perversity, or you check your watch.