Belle de Jour

REVIEW
Buñuel's kinky skewering of bourgeois pretensions stars a luminous Deneuve as a terminally bored doctor's wife who escapes her ennui in bizarre, masochistic sexual daydreams. These fantasies turn to reality when she lands an afternoon shift at a high-class Parisian brothel where she is given the titular alias. Belle de Jour is a mostly cerebral but masterful and at times giddy dialectic on sexual repression, the Church and the meaningless, philistine lives of the upper classes. As usual, Buñuel mixes fantasy, reality and flashback to the point where the viewer is pressed to wonder which is real. Deneuve is hypnotic as the wistful Belle, whose desire for sexual humiliation seems to be her only avenue for rebellion against the constraints of her social position. Page is in fine form as the Belle's madam, a lesbian who fancies the icy beauty of her newest protégé. (French with English subtitles)