Belle de Jour (1967)
Directed by Luis Buñuel
Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.
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What critics compared Belle de Jour to
Honest about his influences, he cites soft-core Europorn from the ’60s and ’70s as inspiration for this oddly affecting tale, hat-tipping such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Jess Franco’s A Virgin Among the Living Dead.
In between bouts of more extraneous babbling, they execute all but one of the flunkies and take back a valuable briefcase that when opened emits a yellow glow that we never see the contents of (which is a direct lift from Bunuel's Belle de Jour).
(Derived, perhaps, from the mysterious box in Bunuel's Belle de Jour.)
Back in 1970, more than 30,000 people responded to a Sunday newspaper questionnaire about the films that most closely resembled dreams, the top 15 ranging from Last Year at Marienbad and 2001 to Belle de jour and The Seventh Seal.
Buñuel created dream sequences in the teasing masterpieces “Belle de Jour” (1967) and “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), but he was not making a hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar thriller.
Red Sparrow aspires to the Libertine surreality of Buñuel's Belle de Jour but succeeds only in replicating that film's sadomasochism and glassy-eyed bourgeois kink.
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Why not introduce an unwashed teen-ager who wants to lurk in his room and listen to old Anthrax LPs, or a wife so refulgent with good fortune, like Catherine Deneuve in “Belle de Jour,” that she can’t wait to nip back to the planet and get nasty with that guy from the tattoo parlor?
In the tradition of "Repulsion," "Belle de Jour" and "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," "The Piano Teacher" creates a hermetic, frightening world, and Huppert delivers a courageous performance as the woman around whom it ultimately falls apart.
Mr. Carriere is the French writer whose screenplays (''Belle de Jour,'' ''The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,'' among others) for Luis Bunuel exemplify the seamless collaboration possible when a brilliant director meets a brilliant writer who knows the director's mind better than the director possibly does.
Thanks to Scorsese, Mirimax picked up the distribution rights to the "lost" classic by director Luis Buñuel (who is probably most famous for slicing up that cow eye in 1928's Un Chien Andalou).
A Spaniard who came to France in the 1920s and then worked with the great Salvador Dali in the first of his many successes – 1929’s groundbreaking “Un Chien Andalou” – he was one of the great early provocateurs of International cinema, and uses his camera to discover the stirring depths of characters who were intoxicated by perversions or questionable pastimes.
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She's not cruel or highfalutin' like the ghouls from The Exterminating Angel and The Phantom of Liberty and her decision to take a job from two to five at Madame Anais's brothel isn't motivated by money but by a need to be.
His greatest film was “The Exterminating Angel,” about a group of intelligent socialites whose imprisonment at a dinner party reduces them to basic – and uncouth – human behaviors.