Belle de Jour

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.

Cast

Catherine Deneuve

as Séverine Serizy

Jean Sorel

as Pierre Serizy

Michel Piccoli

as Henri Husson

Geneviève Page

as Madame Anais

Pierre Clémenti

as Marcel

Françoise Fabian

as Charlotte

Macha Méril

as Renée

Muni

as Pallas

Maria Latour

as Mathilde

Claude Cerval

as The Driver (uncredited)

Reviews

talisencrw

A wonderful parable of love, relationships and the place in both for fantasy and imagination. Certainly much more enjoyable to watch, not to mention better acted and directed, than recent delvings into that subject matter, like Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (though that wasn't the latter's point). I...

lwpcolonel

A blunt surprise insofar as the movies stark depictions of both a young woman's eccentric erotic fantasies alongside a rather harsh alternative lifestyle. In the middle there is a very conventional and ordinary real life tale of a married couple where the husband has no idea what's going on within h...

CinemaSerf

The slightly kinky opening scenes of this film go some way to explaining just why "Severine" (Catherine Deneuve) isn't so satisfied with her handsome yet sexually uninspiring husband "Pierre" (Jean Sorel). Indeed, quickly we gather that they are yet to consummate their nuptials at all! Increasingly ...

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