To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of Luis Buñuel's film, Studiocanal delights us with the reissue of Belle de Jour on Blu-Ray.
1967, we are in the midst of a social revolution in France. That year saw the adaptation of Joseph Kessel's 1928 novel brought to French screens by the Spanish director. Based on a script by the Kessel-Buñuel-Carrière trio, Belle de Jour is a pavement in the pond that is part of the theme of the French New Wave and augurs the student revolutions of 1968.
In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve, who delighted audiences with Jacques Demy's colourful and highly choreographed romances (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, 1964 and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967), plays Séverine, a young bourgeois woman who is bored to death in her marriage. Sexually frustrated, she has masochistic dreams and secretly dreams of blossoming on the carnal level. In order to kill time, she becomes a resident of a brothel and is originally baptized "beautiful day" by the boss because of her hours of "work".
Half a century after its release, the film has benefited from a 4K restoration premiered at the last Cannes Film Festival. It has not taken a wrinkle both on the substance (the place of the woman in society as an object of desire, unfortunately considered as exchangeable at will) as on a purely buñuelist form (pardon the neologism) which admirably combines the world of dream and reality.
The additional content of the Blu Ray will delight moviegoers with several exchanges between Luis Buñuel and Jean Claude Carrière. First of all, a one-hour masterclass that retraces the great hours of the two filmmakers. We will also be able to enjoy a 95-minute interview on the backstage of the shooting and the themes addressed in the film. Also present in the Blu-Ray, an interview with Dr. Sylvain Mimoun, which deals with the sexual liberation of women. It should be noted that Jean Claude Carrière revealed in Cannes that he had interviewed many women before writing the script. He assures that masochistic passages are not male fads but rather the image of more or less confessed feminine fantasies.
This magnificent collector's item will be available from August 16 in all the usual points of sale.
