Belle de Jour (Bunuel, 1967): Prince Charles Cinema, 3.30pm
This film (also screening on March 5th) is part of the Luis Bunuel season at the Prince Charles Cinema. Full details here.
Time Out review:
One of the sly, Spanish provocateur’s
greatest popular successes, ‘Belle de Jour’ is a
mischievously deadpan and classically cool 1967 adaptation of Joseph
Kessel’s ‘cheap’ fictionalised tale of a Parisian doctor’s wife who
secretly volunteers for the two-till-five shift at an upmarket brothel.
It opens with French cinema’s prim, fair Miss Frigidaire, Catherine Deneuve,
being roughly trussed and stripped by her husband, before ‘the little
whore’ is whipped and distainfully left for the carnal satisfaction of
his two coachmen. As Luis Buñuel and his scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière
make clear, this is a mere fantasy in the head of their masochistic
heroine. Nevertheless, it was received as a confrontational
‘liberationist’ shock at the time. If, for us jaded children and
grandchildren of the ’60s, 40 years of bombardment by explicit sexual
imagery has made that impact unrecoverable, the undiminished power of
the film resides more in the mesmeric audacity of Buñuel’s method. The
productive friction – be it between the salacious material and the
‘chaste’ formality of how it’s observed; the ersatz ‘elegance’ of the
salon and the perverse etiquettes of the Yves Saint Laurent-clothed,
cigarette-chewing prostitutes and their clients; or the hallucinatory
melding of fantasy and reality – still generates heat like a nuclear
reactor.
Wally Hammond
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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