"I have an idea. Would you like to be called "Belle de Jour?" Madame Anais
☆☆☆☆☆ Masterpiece
Belle de Jour - Beauty of the Day (1967) is the merging of fantasy and real worlds through erotica.
Directed by Luis Buñuel.
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel and Michel Piccoli among others.
While watching Belle De Jour I saw the scene below and completely understood what Buñuel was trying to say in this movie. Luis lived in a dream world and spent his entire film directing career trying to merge the dream world with reality. Buñuel started his film career with a dream filled short film Un Chien Andalou (1929) that has no meaning and finally achieved mixing the dream world with the real world in Belle De Jour.
The key to this film is the wheelchair in the scene below. Luis always gave audiences subtle, obscure visual hints in his films as our dreams give us images which give us insights into our subconscious. Anyways, its an odd moment when Jean stops to look at a wheelchair on a street corner. He makes a comment about it to Catherine then gets into their car and looks at the wheelchair as they drive off. I knew Luis was giving me a big clue, but it wasn't until the end that I understood what the wheelchair meant to the film as a whole. Buñuel later at the end of the film has Sorel blind and crippled in the same wheelchair from the street scene. At end of the film Jean opens his eyes, gets up out of the wheelchair and hugs and kisses and laughs with Deneuve. I then understood what the film was really saying about reality and dreams. Luis is saying that Catherine day-dreamed the entire prostitution scenes to escape her boring married sexual life. Deneuve had the money, the young, handsome surgeon husband, the couture clothing, the mansion in the city and country estate on the weekends. What she needed was a sadomasochistic husband who would defile and awakened her depraved sexual desires. In other words, this babe was really bent sexually and needed a fantasy life, so she could escape her boring reality and not throw it away. Catherine character is one smart cookie. Deneuve's character realized that if she followed her bent sexual desires it would destroy her privileged lifestyle, so she created her ideal depraved sexual life in a dream world of a happy hooker that only she could indulge in.
Note - If you would like to view Belle de Jour - Beauty of the Day to rent or buy please click on the link below the comments. It is sponsored by Google, so it is the safest and most secure way to get a copy for your film library.
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