Cheap Belle de jour (DVD) (Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel) (Luis Buñuel) Price

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Customer Reviews of Belle de jour

5 Star Movie, 1 Star DVD
The movie is a Bunuel classic. But the dvd looks horrible. Yes, it's an old film. But I refuse to believe that this is the best it can look. It's been said many times, but Criterion should have been the ones to handle this. There is a TON of dirt speckled all over the screen throughout the film. Scratches pop up WAY to often. The colors frequently change, fading or changing tint, during many scenes. There is an overall lack of sharpness as well. Basically, anything that could be wrong with the picture quality, is.

It's watchable, and by all means worth renting. But I can't recommend buying it. One can only hope it is cleaned up and given better treatment at some point. But don't let the poor video quality stop you from viewing, or re-viewing, the movie.

As has been pointed out by many others, there is no interview with Deneuve. However, at least there is a commentary track. While far from the best analytical commentary I've heard for an older film, this is still worth a listen. Julie Jones clearly knows her subject and she provides a very listenable track.

Criterion has done such a bang up job with three other Bunuel classics, it's a shame that they weren't able to make this film look as fantastic as it probably can. With any luck, sometime in the future we'll see a much better transfer.

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Revolution by day-dream.
'Belle De Jour' opens with a woman being dragged out of a landau by her husband and two coachmen, pushed into a forest, tied to a tree, stripped, viciously whipped and then assaulted. This shocking display of male violence and female submission, implicating characters, director and (desiring male) viewer, will become the film's main theme, but not in the way it first appears. As the film continues, Severine, a frigid, bourgeois wife, will be splattered with excrement, will lie in a coffin to stimulate a role-playing Duke, will work as a prostitute during the day, where she will meet an abusive lover. She shares a name with the heroine of Sacher-Masoch's 'Venus In Furs', that classic text of masochism, the pleasure in being abused. These instances of degradation and humiliation, however, are the perverse means of her liberation. In her perfect bourgeois world, with her perfect, handsome bourgeois husband, their well-appointed apartment, maid, rich friends, tennis clubs, expensive holidays and glamorous clothes, Severine is infantilised, treated like a child. She is cossetted, every desire pandered to until she has no (speakable) desire. She is mostly silent, rejecting that language-trap created for adults. When she visits her husband at work, she is a nuisance to be gently removed.

To regain or enact her desire, Severine becomes a prostitute. It is no accident in Bunuel that the worlds of sexuality and of work meet. In debasing her indolent bourgeois self, she finds her true self again. This split between middle-class courtesan and prostitute echoes the other splits in the film, that between mind and body, male and female, dream/fantasy and reality, past and present, city and country. Split, of course, is the wrong word - there are no absolutes in Bunuel, and these opposites meld and reinforce one another - as in a dream, every character, from the maid's child to the madame Anais to the diabolic Husson, is a plausible projection of Severine. Besides the fantasies of debasement and weird sex Severine indulges, are flashbacks to her childhood (or reimaginings of her past?), with incidents of paedophilia and sacrilege, Severine trying, as now, to resist male authority figures manipulating her 'innocence', sexually and socially.

'Belle De Jour' is seen as the opening gambit of Bunuel's celebrated late period, that series of glossy, big-budget, usually French films with big stars. But filming a glossy milieu is not the same as being a glossy film, and 'Belle', with the hard functionality of a Bresson, has the same mix of rigorous detachment, tight concentration and intense subversive subjectivity as Bunuel's best work, in this case surface smoothness being constantly broken down. In that first scene, we watch, without context, violence inflicted on a woman. Through the subsequent film, Severine will learn not only to look for herself (and see things we can't), but also take the power of shaping the film, blurring its boundaries. Catherine Deneuve's intensely private, unyielding performance is the film's soul, with only that famous smirk of satisfaction after the businessman with the unseen toy, tantalising us into answers.

Though primarily a Surrealist social comedy, 'Belle De Jour' is also a Gothic film, from that opening Hammer-horror sequence; to its narrative fractured by dreams; to its interest in double identities, broken bodies and the conflict between desire and duty, sex and spirit, sex and death; to its castles and Sadean figures. But it is also a marvellously funny parody of Godard's 'Breathless' - the gangster sub-plot is announced by a seller barking 'New York Herald Tribune'; concerns a posing young hoodlum agonising over an unattainable woman; hinges on betrayal and a pastiche denouement that out-sillies the original. Godard would repay the favour later that year with his most Bunuellian film, 'Week End'.

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okay
Somewhat disappointed, very limited action, easy enough to follow.